Design-based Research - Exploring Student-Centered Learning Analytics Dashboards for Simulation-Based Training

During my research internship at the University of Gothenburg, I had the opportunity to contribute to the EU-funded i-MASTER project (Horizon Europe). The project aims to develop an intelligent and adaptive learning system (ILS) for maritime simulator-based education — an area where learning analytics has great potential, but where the student perspective has often been overlooked.

Research Focus

Together with my colleague, I set out to explore a key question:

How can a student-facing multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) dashboard be designed to provide meaningful feedback that enhances learning in maritime simulator training?

This meant moving beyond instructor-facing tools to ask students directly what kind of feedback they need, value, and actually use during simulation-based activities, ensuring that students learn in these safety-critical environments.

Methods

To address this, we combined qualitative and design-based methods:

👥👥 Participatory Co-Design Workshop with six maritime students (group discussion + sketching session)

Participatory Design Workshop Set-up

📊 Grounded theory coding and thematic analysis to identify categories such as communication, stress, and situational awareness

✍🏻 Iterative low-fidelity prototyping (paper sketches → digital Figma prototype)

💻 User testing with three students using a think-aloud protocol

Key Insights

The students emphasized that effective feedback goes beyond scores or metrics:

• Communication, stress, and situational awareness were seen as critical areas where feedback could improve learning

• There was a clear tension between collective feedback from instructors vs. students’ desire for individualized insights

• Students requested narrative, personalized explanations instead of raw data visualizations — a finding that resonates with the idea of data storytelling in learning analytics (see Master's Thesis)

Prototype

Based on these insights, we designed a student-facing dashboard prototype.

General Ideas of the prototype, based on our research:

• Mobile-first, scrollable interface

• Simple, icon- and text-based structure

• Features for customizable visualization and data comparison

• AI-based narrative bot to provide feedback in explanatory form

• Personal development page to track growth over time

  
  

The prototype was presented as a clickable pen-and-paper prototype, allowing for further iteration and integration into the i-MASTER project and as a base for user testing.

Check out some of the designs below ⤵️

To view the whole prototype open the annotated slides ⤵️

i-MASTER Annotated Prototype_ Internship.pdf

Download PDF • 827KB

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Impact

• Research results formed the basis of a long paper submitted to CSCL 2025 (nominated for "outstanding long paper")

  • Paper will be presented again at the SimPro Workshop at USN, Norway on October 23rd by Susan Harrington, Alice Fratoni and me

• Findings and prototype were presented to the i-MASTER consortium partners (including Fraunhofer and University of Norway), sparking discussion on learner-centered approaches

  • Fraunhofers developers were pleasantly surprised of the tangibility of these outcomes, because they perceived it as tremendously more helpful than just written research results

ℹ️ This blogpost was mproved through ChatGPT. For more information on how I work with GenAI, read this article or contact me.