Human-centred design of learning analytics (LA) places the user and their needs at the centre of the design process of any LA system. This can be achieved, for example, by running co-design workshops with potential users of the system. During such workshops, users are prompted to describe their current needs and enabled to generate solutions that serve those needs. Such an approach can reduce the burden resting on the development team to design and implement a usable, useful and foolproof tool as they already have input from the users on what they would need. At the same time, future users feel ownership over the resulting system and are more inclined to adopt it.
Ioana Jivet and Manuel Valle Torre (CEL) facilitated such a workshop with the Labrador team. The objective of the workshop was to design an LA interface for teachers for the Queue, a virtual queue that helps teaching staff to handle practical sessions in higher education. The Queue is part of Labrador, a system under development, that manages lab sessions, assignment submission, review and feedback, and other teacher-student interaction.
The workshop, taking place on February 26, 2020, involved 15 participants that were either EEMCS teaching staff, teaching assistants and/or members of the Labrador development team. The workshop started by analysing the current tools and methods that teachers and TAs use to monitor their students and defining pedagogical problems to be solved with analytics in Labrador. Next, ideas were drafted for technical solutions that describe system features, map data sources to information needs and visualise this information. These proposals were then prioritised in terms of usefulness, urgency and feasibility in order to create a plan for prototyping. The final phase consists of setting up a plan for evaluation (i.e., defining success indicators and ways to collect data for these indicators), this was discussed with the lead developer and is to be tackled by the development team.
In the future, a similar workshop will be conducted with students in order to identify what are their needs from the Labrador system that LA can support and serve.