This is both a story about making data visualizations accessible and actionable for educators in a way that makes sense for their own unique goals and community, but also about the importance of collaborative design.

Along with increasing expectations that educators use digital curriculum and online resources, are implications about how resulting learner-generated data should be utilized. What related successes, opportunities, and challenges have you faced? We would love to know.

Have you been asked to look at and make use of online data? What are the disconnects between what the data shows you and what you want to know? Do data and visualizations help to level the playing field, identifying and supporting underserved learners, or are these systems not even designed with such learners/environments in mind?

First of all, it looks like people are having fun and working hard!
As I watched, however, I thought about how I might ‘inhabit" the role of mentor. It looks like the student-to-mentor ratio is fairly high, and it was intriguing to see the mentor sitting at the computer while all that activity was happening in front of her. Is the system a way for the mentor to enter notes and track what’s happening (so, a project-tracker)? But your abstract talks about learner-generated data. How are the data collected, and what more do the mentors get from it that they would not get by floating and interacting with their teams of girls, and making notes on a clipboard-based protocol?

Presenting information to mentors so that they can support individual learners is essential. It is great that you are able to get feedback from mentors and have that drive the improvement of the tool that you are creating. I have some of the same questions that Brian mentioned above, how is the data getting into the tracker?

Also, is this a tool only for the mentor? Is it (could it also be) a metacognitive tool for the learner? Will the learner see their progress over time and use this information as part of their learning journey?

Hi, Pati. Thanks for your clarifying questions — 3 minutes is a fun way to get the story out there, but it was hard to fit a lot of specific information in! This is part of a larger study looking at educator dashboards in different types of learning environments.

In the environment showcased in the video, the online platform tracks and logs specific user actions on the system in a system database. We have linked that database with Tableau, a data visualization and analysis tool that we use to create flexible and dynamic and evolving dashboards for the educators to look at student activity in the online platform.

The girls have their own view of where they are in the pathway on an individual level through their profile page on the system, as well as building a portfolio of work as the program unfolds.

Hi, Caitlin. I’ve worked a bit on building teacher dashboards for blended learning programs and also am currently in the midst of a design process building an exploratory learning environment through a fairly collaborative design, so I figured I might try to address some of the questions you posed.

I agree with your mentor that it is SO CRUCIALLY important to get feedback from your users on what they want and need from a data dashboard. You might find quite varied use or that a piece you thought vital is never used by your teachers/mentors. At this point, you can decide that 1) the piece is unimportant and should be removed, or 2) this piece is important and we must train teachers on how to use it. I believe that including some training and guides alongside dashboards are critical in helping a teacher to interpret the data story she is viewing, and in my own work I’ve done so by creating a variety of student types and illustrating how I might understand their progress through the dashboard and data.

In terms of disconnects, I think it depends on your data and what you are aiming to learn. Of course we cannot reduce a student to a few bar charts. One common issue I’ve seen is the lack of longitudinal information. Unless I know each student well, it often helps to see the pattern in their behaviors and scores over time.

I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts on any of the above as well!

Thanks for putting together such a nice video, Caitlin. Besides the dashboard “snapshot”, have you thought of any other management tools for mentors and learners that might be extracted from the data you collect?

What a great project! Is there time set aside to help the students understand the data presented or learn more about data visualization? I realize this isn’t the focus of the project, but thought there might be interesting for the students to both learn about data visualization and learn about themselves as learners.

Hi Caitlin I loved learning about the program and the digital dashboards! A similar challenge of understanding youth learning and using this kind of data to support mentors to reflect on facilitation emerged in our project so it is fantastic to see others thinking about this issue! (see our video here: http://stemforall2016.videohall.com/presentatio...
Thanks for answers to earlier questions that helped me understand more about the system. I love that you are linking with tableau for the visualization part. What do you track in these displays? Are you using existing database tools to create the data to link with Tableau? Great work!