Designing Dashboards to Support Teachers in Online Learning Tools.

Online learning contexts make it difficult for the teachers to be aware of the progress of their classrooms. As the absence of in-person interaction in online learning inhibits students' perceptions about their learning to be conveyed to the teacher. Considering the context of online programming education, similar problems arise. Designing data rich interfaces for teachers that provide them with desired information about the classroom and learners will facilitate the teachers to monitor the progress of learners. In this work we present the design of teachers' dashboards for an online learning programming laboratory tool. This tool encourages students to acquire programming skills by practicing concepts and has been incorporated in two online programming courses of two different bachelor's degree programs. Even though the teachers could view each learner's solved activities, it was still difficult for them to have a clear view of how each learner is progressing in their practice and what is the learning status of the entire classroom. The identification of this issue is a consequence of the user-centered design (UCD) approach that has been carried out to design the dashboards, actively involving the course teachers. The involvement of teachers made it possible to identify user scenarios that were helpful in definition of the key performance indicators (KPIs) and views for the different dashboards. The designed teachers' dashboards for the online learning laboratory are an effective tool for the teachers to make timely decisions related to the classroom that could affect the students' learning, performance, and engagement.