Data Storytelling for Feedback Analytics

Feedback is an essential process of learning in higher education. Yet, capturing students’ interactions with feedback is challenging, which makes it difficult to evaluate its impact. Learning Analytics (LA) is a potential solution to address this issue as it is capable of capturing and analysing learners’ activities in a technology-enabled learning environment. LA often use dashboards to deliver insights derived from educational data, yet questions remain on how to most effectively communicate key insights to students. Data Storytelling (DS) is a promising technique to address this challenge by combining data, visuals and narrative to convey key insights. Co-design can facilitate the crafting of visualisations and data stories that best aligns with goals of the students. This study presents the preliminary findings from a design sprint conducted with students to co-design a prototype for a dashboard of an LA solution – PolyFeed – that captures and analyses students’ interactions with feedback. In developing the dashboards, students used DS principles – Explanatory titles, Annotations, Highlighting important data points, and Decluttering – to improve the selected visualisations. The results show that the student groups perceived visualising strengths and weaknesses identified in feedback, action plans based on feedback, and trends in their performance as key aspects to include in FA dashboard. However, they primarily used two DS principles: explanatory titles and highlighting key data points to improve visualisations because the dataset was pre-dominantly qualitative. Therefore, the effective use of DS to support qualitative data should be further explored.