Leveraging Peer-Learning Environments for Visualizing Engagement, Achievements and Competencies at Scale

Learning dashboards present a large amount of data using visualisations that support exploration of learning activities by different stakeholders. Students can use the visualisations for self-reflection and comparison of themselves with their peers, and teachers can use the visualisations to gain insight on class-level and individual-level knowledge gaps. Most of the current learning dashboards rely on logs as their primary data source, which greatly reflects students’ engagement level, but they are not a reliable source for capturing the achievements or competencies of learners. In this paper, a new learning dashboard for Visualising Engagement, Achievements, and Competencies at Scale (VEACaS) is presented. This learning dashboard harnesses data generated through students’ interactions with a Peer-Learning Environment, called PeerWise, and provides visualisations that demonstrate the level of engagement, achievements, and competencies of the students. VEACaS is analysed using both synthetic and real data sets. Results are promising, indicating that VEACaS can provide meaningful visualisations to both students and teachers in different learning environments.