Inventing the Digital Dashboard for Learning

Carnegie Mellon is creating a Digital Dashboard for Learning (DDL) to enable faculty and students to tune their immediate actions (lectures, assignments, study) based on rapid feedback on student progress in learning. The DDL will provide faculty with a timely overview of student progress in blended learning environments supported by the Open Learning Initiative, Carnegie Mellon’s project to develop high quality online courses and course materials. The DDL will provide access to details of learning measurements tied to course topics and “drill down” links to original presentation materials. It will enable faculty to aggressively adapt lectures and assignments to address weaknesses in measured student performance. This paper describes the requirements for the DDL, design and implementation issues, such as modifications in associated learning objects, tagging of student interactions, data collection and analysis, and the form and content of data presentation to the faculty and students.