Dashboards for admins, teachers, and students: tools for monitoring and learning

Delivering online or blended courses in digital environments requires an ongoing monitoring process involving platform administrators, faculty, and students. Administrators have to monitor the organization and use of the platform hosting the courses by checking parameters such as transmission speed, memory usage, number of logged users, login time, courses and activities. Teachers need to track class participation, students’ access to and completion of activities, deadlines and tasks, page visits, file downloads, and grade distribution. Students should check materials, assignments, and assessments by controlling their progress to self-regulate their learning, and comparing their results with the class average. Online platforms produce a significant amount of data. Based on the data collected, dashboards present useful visualizations and information for each group mentioned above. By aggregating more indicators, they provide an overview of how platforms, courses, and learning processes work. Our contribution presents the design of three dashboards for admins, teachers, and students, a process that requires teaching and technical skills. The first one, the admin’s dashboard, whose development process will also be described, is planned to enhance the platform management and control technologically. The dashboards for teachers and students aim to enhance teaching and learning processes and achieve valuable information on course delivery from a methodological point of view. The dashboards are developed using Grafana, a tool that offers cloud and open-source solutions for creating and sharing visualizations within a team/learners community without ingesting data but only working on data in whatever system they are recorded in. The analyzed data and dashboards referred to a Moodle platform that hosts four blended degree courses at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and is managed by Edunova Center.