World Wide Web

Descriptive statistics

Process (computing)

Engineering

Analytics

Pure mathematics

Statistics

Field (mathematics)

Operating system

Computer science

Mechanical engineering

Academic advising

Psychology

Mathematics

Political science

Dashboard

Work (physics)

Learning analytics

Data science

Artificial intelligence

Medicine

Medical education

Knowledge management

Perspective (graphical)

Higher education

Computers in Human Behavior

From the perspective of Learning and Educational Technologies, academic advising has been one of the most overlooked aspects of academic support systems, despite being critical for the learning process and final success of students. The majority of higher education institutions provides simple technical support to academic advisers with basic descriptive statistics. This article presents the general design and implementation of a Learning Analytics Dashboard for Advisers (LADA), to support the decision-making process of academic advisers through comparative and predictive analysis. Moreover, this work evaluates the use of this tool to support decision-making of actual advisers in two different higher education institutions (University A, University B), compared with more traditional procedures and tools. Results indicate that LADA enables expert advisers to evaluate significantly more scenarios (Median = 2), especially for high advising difficulty cases with students that failed many courses (MedianA=3,MedianB=2.5), in a not-significantly different amount of time. For inexperienced advisers, LADA is perceived as a valuable tool for more accurate and efficient decision-making, as they were able to make informed decisions in a similar amount of time compared to the experts. These results are encouraging for further developments in the field.

LADA: A learning analytics dashboard for academic advising