Introducing the Student Dashboard
I have been asked to introduce myself and the project I am on. Hi, I’m Rikki. I am currently finishing my PhD and working on a JISC funded project called the “Southampton Student Dashboard”. I have blogged a bit before about life as a student, in case you want a sense of my style.
The Southampton Student Dashboard (I’ll drop the “Southampton” from now on) is a project associated with the Southampton Learning Environment (SLE), and aims to provide a single view of a student’s data to both the student and the various members of university staff that interact with that student.
The hope is that the Student Dashboard will provide a more student-centric approach, by allowing anyone dealing with a student to have all of the appropriate information to hand, without having to contact the myriad of existing owners of this data. This will hopefully enhance the student’s experience and improve retention.
We’ve identified a number of challenges that lie ahead for us. Retrieving the data we need to feed the Student Dashboard will involve both social and technical hurdles. There are clearly going to be privacy issues involved with exposing this data, and close attention will be paid to ensuring protecting sensitive information. There will also be the chance to explore some of the ways of exposing different views of the data to different people, depending on their role and relationship to the student.
At the moment, we are meeting with the various stakeholders (student services, academic tutors, senior tutors, students) to determine which data they require in their interactions with students. We are also in discussions with the computing services staff (iSolutions) about how we will actually access the data from the various existing systems.
The following stages will involve more of the stakeholders in a co-design of the system and interface, which will lead to a prototype being constructed and piloted.
It is looking like an interesting project and I look forward to posting more about it on here. Stay tuned!
I am a teaching fellow in Electronics and Computer Science, teaching modules on the Computer Science degree, Information Technology in Organisations degree and Engineering Foundation Year. I studied my undergraduate degree and PhD at the University of Southampton, and loved it enough to stick around :-) My research is in the area of Technology Enhanced Learning, including methods of adapting teaching resources to the student and novel approaches to teaching programming.
Does this mean you’re fixing/replacing SUSSED?
Not entirely. The SLE project (http://blog.soton.ac.uk/oneshare/tag/sle/) is essentially aiming to replace SUSSED, and integrate aspects of a VLE too.
The Student Dashboard is associated with the SLE, and will hopefully be rolled out as a feature of it. In fact, I think it’s a feature that isn’t really in SUSSED currently.
To you Clare, I would describe it as a souped up ECS People Page, with role-specific views. Say you are meeting with a student, Anne, because they have a problem they need to discuss with you, and you want to quickly look at that’s student’s information to gain some context for your meeting.
Depending on your job, you will be allowed access to different data, and importantly, you will prioritise that data differently. If you’re their academic tutor, you might be interested in exam and coursework grades, whereas someone in careers need to know what subject you study and which year you’re in.
Lots to say, but I should probably save it for a blog post!