3.2.2. Engaging students through LADs

In LAD research, it has been mentioned that students will engage with LADs if they trust the data and understand how they are calculated (de Quincey et al., 2019; Rets et. al., 2021). This implies that teachers have to explain the reasons why students receive a particular recommendation. This will increase students’ trust in LADs and the likelihood of them following the recommendation (Rets et al., 2021)                                                                                                                          

In addition, when teachers use LADs, they have to enable learners to plan and organise learning, provide personalised analyses of their learning and adaptive recommendations for study material (Schumacher & Ifenthaler, 2018). In other words, while LAD’s provide numerical feedback on “how students perform”, teachers have to complete this feedback by offering learners guidelines and recommendations on how they can perform better.

The literature (Sedrakyan et al., 2020) has pointed out that the LADs were more appealing to successful students and to those students who pursued outstanding performance. For this reason, it is important that teachers address the needs of both novice and expert learners. To this regard, a common dashboard for all learners is not always the best strategy. It is important to customise it according to learners’ level.

Skilled learners ⇒ to display information related to their achievement is beneficial

Novice learners ⇒to display comparative information related to their achievement can be frustrating and can lead to disengagement. It is important that teachers help them recognise the benefit of monitoring their learning behaviour and that at the same time these quantitative data are not the only way to measure their progress and their skills.

In order to foster learner engagement, customizable dashboards should show:

●       Content progress indicators

●       The percentage of learning activities completed

●       The level of engagement in discussion

●       The timing of completing activities

Most of all, as a recent study suggests (Rets et al. 2021), teachers should set up the “Study Recommender”, which is a tool that reminds students of the learning materials they have missed and represents a direct way to access the learning content.                                                                                                         

The next best practice, based on the study by (Jivet et al., 2021) will show the use of LADs as a feedback and engagement tool for students.  Additional uses of LAD oriented towards “actionable insights to learners” are presented in Susnjak et al. (2022).