Congratulations to Dr. Hong Shui!

In June 2024, Dr. Hong Shui successfully defended her dissertation titled, “Tackling the Alignment Problem: Design a Learning Analytics Dashboard to Support Teacher Inquiry.” Family members, colleagues, faculty, and both current and former classmates joined together virtually as she presented her dissertation research.

Dissertation Abstract: Aligning learning analytics with learning design could offer opportunities for teacher inquiry and thereby support teachers to work as designers (Macfadyen et al., 2020; Mor et al., 2015; Persico & Pozzi, 2015; Schmitz et al., 2022). However, the alignment between learning analytics and learning design is often lacking. To mitigate the gap, this dissertation designed and implemented a learning analytics dashboard to support teacher inquiry into student’s learning process in social annotation activities. The dashboard provided actionable information for teachers to reflect on and then adjust their learning design and teaching practice.

Using design-based research (Bakker, 2018), this study included design and implementation phases at a public university in the United States. In the design phase, I engaged three teachers in co-designing a teacher-facing dashboard for social annotation activities under the guidance of the Activity-Centered Analysis and Design framework (Goodyear et al., 2021). In the implementation phase, the designed dashboard was used by three teachers in their distinct courses during Fall 2023. The analysis of qualitative and the quantitative data indicated that the dashboard provided actionable information for teachers to reflect on and then adjust their learning design and teaching practice for social annotation activities. This study provides insights and implications for tackling the alignment problem when designing learning analytics tools to support learning design and teacher inquiry.