Toward the development of a dynamic dashboard for FutureLearn MOOCs: insights and directions

In recent years, many higher education institutions have invested in the development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). With the increase of available MOOC data, there is an opportunity to provide insights to educators and developers into learners’ behaviors through learning analytics. Focusing on the FutureLearn platform (FL), standardized data files are offered to partner institutions. Additionally, a report is offered to stakeholders, but it is limited in a number of ways: it is static, it is limited in presenting relevant information and, most importantly, it does not provide ‘real-time’ access to data. This paper provides an overview of the rationale and the development process of a dynamic and near real-time dashboard. It explores the viability of different types of visualizations with the available data, lessons learned, comparisons with similar efforts, and future directions are discussed.