Data comics help students understand complex learning dashboards
Decoding the Dashboard: Data Comics to Support Students' Understanding of Learning Analytics Visualisations
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Learning dashboards show students data about their studies to help them reflect and make decisions, but the visuals can be too tricky for some students. The authors studied how adding storytelling images called data comics can support learning by explaining these visuals more clearly. They found nursing students and teachers liked the comics because they made complicated charts easier to understand and more interesting. However, too much information in the comics can overwhelm students, so careful design is important.
What this means in practice
- •For educational technology developers: Create learning dashboards that include data comics to help users interpret complex educational data more easily.$Commercial implications: Enables development of enhanced learning dashboard products that improve student engagement and understanding.
- •For instructional designers: Design course materials that incorporate data comics to support students with low visualisation literacy.
Authors
Mikaela Elizabeth Milesi, Vanessa Echeverria, Lixiang Yan, Yueqiao Jin, Riordan Alfredo, Jie Xiang Fan, Linxuan Zhao, Dragan Gašević, Yi-Shan Tsai, Roberto Martinez-Maldonado
Abstract
Learning analytics dashboards (LADs) are intended to help students make sense of their learning data to support reflection and decision-making. However, their visualisations can be complex, particularly for students with low visualisation literacy. Narrative techniques, such as annotated charts and data comics, have been used to communicate insights directly, but not as supplementary materials to empower students to explore their visualisations themselves. In response, we conducted a qualitative study examining how data comics can complement LADs. We interviewed 18 nursing students and 4 of their teachers about a multimodal LAD containing visualisations with data comics explaining them. Analysis showed that data comics were clear, engaging, and helped make complex visualisations more accessible, though they must be carefully designed to avoid overwhelming students with information. The findings suggest that both students and teachers are receptive to data comics as a means of supporting the interpretability of LADs.