Feedback with learning analytics – Interdisciplinary design of a dashboard for students

Formative feedback has a positive impact on students’ academic performance, satisfaction and self-directed learning. In addition, feedback that contains a significant amount of information has been shown to have the greatest impact on learning outcomes and academic performance. This paper presents an approach to providing formative feedback using learning analytics in distance education, which aims to guide students in their learning process towards an exam. This approach uses students’ online activities as indicators of engagement that can be used for highly informative feedback. These indicators are derived from clickstreams that focus on data to support metacognitive learning strategies. In collaboration with lecturers, an interdisciplinary approach was used to develop a learning analytics dashboard that helps students reflect on their learning and exam preparation. This “Feedbackzentrum” (feedback center) includes data visualisations combined with rules-based feedback texts and information to support self-regulated learning. Finally, the development and research work to date is discussed, and future developments are outlined.