Supporting awareness and self-regulation in project-based learning through personalised dashboards

Abstract

Project-based learning (PBL) enables learners to carry out challenging and authentic projects through investigations. However, PBL is difficult to implement successfully because learners often lack the selfregulation skills required to monitor, reflect, manage and assess their project activities and learning. Furthermore, most learning systems rarely offer possibilities to monitor and reflect on their project and learning processes. Hence, in this paper, we propose a general architecture of project-based learning management system. It enhances learners' reflective processes by supporting them in creating customisable indicators by exploring their traces. We developed an implementation named DDART and conducted an experiment in order to evaluate its usability and perceived utility. We found that this system supports learners to reflect and regulate their activities and learning, even if the indicator creation could be difficult for the novices.

Tailored information dashboards

“…In [13], a customizable dashboard display for monitoring mobile energy is presented; users can build their dashboards by selecting predefined widgets and data streams from different sources (sensors, government agencies, social media and generic services). This kind of "manual approach" is also used in [10; 19; 22], in which the customizability capacity is based on the possibility of arrange the components of the dashboard through explicit interaction, and even the capacity of crafting custom indicators, as presented in [22]. The same "customizability principles" are present in other papers, with the difference of involving automatized approaches through configuration files [20; 26; 28], models [15; 27] or pre-defined templates [25].…”

“…A few records were published in 2011 [10; 11], 2012 [12], 2013 [13], 2014 [14][15][16] and 2016 [17; 18]. However, the majority of records are distributed between 2017 [19][20][21][22][23][24] and 2018 [25][26][27][28][29][30][31], six and seven papers respectively.…”

“…Regarding customizable and/or personalized dashboards, it can be seen that Business Intelligence (BI) is the most common application domain (Figure 3), followed by the Internet of Things (IoT), Learning Analytics (LA), services monitoring and social science domains. IoT 2 [16] [18] Learning Analytics 2 [22] [24] Services monitoring 2 [20] [26] Disaster situations 1 [30] Economics 1 [31] Emergency management 1 [17] Energy monitoring 1 [13] Generic 1 [29] Interface evaluation 1 [28] Microservices monitoring 1 [19] Physics 1 [11] Sensor monitoring 1 [15] Social sciences 1 [27] 4.5 MQ5. Which are the factors that condition the dashboards' variability process?…”

Personal informatics systems for supporting self‐regulation in online learning environments

“…The latter would use Glance, whereas the former would not. Motivation: this is a key aspect during the learning process. In this regard, adding gamification techniques could be a good solution. Customization: in line with DDART , a future research line may be to study how to enable learners to easily customize the indicators while avoiding cognitive overloading. Guidance: Glance did not give suggestions that guided students, thus it left the conclusions in learners’ hands. Hence, we plan to use algorithms that utilize the stored data to infer new information that allows us to give some advice.…”

“…In this regard, adding gamification techniques could be a good solution. Customization: in line with DDART [26], a future research line may be to study how to enable learners to easily customize the indicators while avoiding cognitive overloading. Guidance: Glance did not give suggestions that guided students, thus it left the conclusions in learners' hands.…”