3.2.1. What are LADs?

Learning Analytics Dashboards (LADs) are an important subset of learning analytics and refer to the visual representation of the data automatically generated by the system. LADs are data visualisation tools displaying and representing information in a user-friendly way and providing “meaningful and actionable insights at a glance” (Pokhrel & Awasthi, 2021:93).

It is possible to distinguish between teacher-facing dashboards and student-facing dashboards. As Wiedbusch et al. (2021) stress, teacher-facing dashboards are the online data that VLEs platforms show to positively influence teachers’ decision-making in order to foster students’ SRL by providing a holistic overview of students’ behaviour and online trace data.

Figure 1. An example of a teacher-facing dashboard.  eCreators Academy (2019). Intelliboard: the perfect solution for your reporting and analytics. [YouTube Webinar]. Retrieved from

Instead, student-facing dashboards are represented by LMS and show students their performance data. Student-facing dashboards are more oriented toward Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) and provide more complex learning process data (CAMM) (Wiedbusch et al., 2021).

Figure 2. An example of a student-facing dashboard. Screen Capture from the  IntelliBoard for Moodle live demo site: https://moodle.intelliboard.net/login/auto.php

Given that dashboards have the potential of enabling and supporting SRL processes, on the one hand, it is essential to empower learners to actively take part in the feedback process, on the other hand, it is crucial to design effective learning analytics dashboards to improve learners’ SRL skills (Jivet et. al., 2021). Therefore, teachers’ role in this process is crucial because they have to engage learners, turn them into active agents of their own learning and help them introduce and then further reinforce SRL experiences (Wiedbusch et al., 2021).

For more specific information on how dashboards contribute to SRL, please see the conceptual introduction.