Modern technologies can completely change the view on most areas of our life. Education is one of the essential parts of every person’s life. Education means not only traditional schools and higher education institutions but also online educational platforms, applications and a variety of online courses that help millions of people around the world to acquire new knowledge or improve skills.
While some people doubt the usefulness of online learning, the quality of knowledge to be gained, and lack of live communication with teachers, others join online courses and receive all the advantages of remote education. So, as of today, every fourth student in the world has attended online courses at least once, and the further, the more people prefer educational technologies and choose them instead or in a row with standard classes.
To organize the online learning process, it is necessary to take into account all the details, starting with teachers and ending with how easy and conveniently the process of submitting the information to students is organized.
There are many reasons to develop a dashboard for an education platform. With the help of a dashboard, you can quickly and efficiently transform any data concerning the details of the learning process and provide it to students and teachers in the most convenient form. The following graph shows the level of students’ interest in obtaining up-to-date information about everything related to their education process.
In online learning, dashboards are commonly used as a system for monitoring all the processes, tracking changes and control of the performance of tasks assigned to students.
The main advantages of using education dashboard include:
Improving education experience;
Real-time feedback for a student, concerning his/her performance and progress;
Real-time communication with the teacher through the live chat, etc.
As for the teachers, education dashboards also have many advantages:
The possibility to invite users to classes;
New classes creation;
Teachers, as well as the students, can have an overview of the student’s progress in real time.
If you want to build a dashboard for an education project, you need to answer a few questions.
1. Why does your audience need a dashboard? Is there an alternative solution?
2. Who will use this information panel (students, teachers, parents, etc.)?
3. What key indicators should be displayed on the dashboard? What data is needed for these indicators?
4. How will your audience view the information panel (on a desktop, mobile devices)?
5. How often will the visitors look through the dashboard (hourly, daily, etc.)?
Clear answers to all those questions will define the whole process of education dashboard design and development, and cost to build it. It will help to determine the stack of necessary tools and elements of the future panel.
Features that must be included to any dashboard for education
When you decide to build a dashboard for an education project, first, you need to consider all the needs of both, students who will attend classes and teachers who will need the opportunity to make changes in the learning process and monitor student’s activity.
Education dashboard development starts with defining the fundamental features the dashboard must include. Here is the list of the essential ones:
Real-time management of information;
Marks/grades management and their comparative assessment;
Private data protection;
Lesson and activity management;
What are additional features that may be added to the dashboard?
Student disciplinary and registration management;
Education dashboards examples and our best practices
Robotify is a teaching application with two user roles: "Teachers" and "Students." Teachers lease space on robots and then plan classes for students to learn how to use the robots.
The teachers have an interface to book/lease robot time, as well as add/invite users to classes. Teachers can also manage/monitor class when it is in session.
Students log in and go into classes that they are a part of. They go through a series of step by step tasks to train how to use a robot. The class interface has video streaming (of robots) as well as text-based chat.
- Bossy Nagy Group
Web application for farms, which allows you to keep records, as well as make a comparative analysis with competitors in the industry.
GeniusU is the world's number one entrepreneur education platform.
This is the place where you can upgrade and step up to become a leader and mentor for yourself. In this system, you can learn how to become a partner or reseller to get a lot of lucrative offers. GeniusU unites groups of like-minded people who support each other and help in achieving their goals.
- Train Your Game
Train Your Game (TYG) is a revolutionary project in the field of golf. Authors created the unique methodology to improve golf skills for both beginners and professionals. It consists of 4 challenges (3 unique and 4th - 3 in 1 in a row). The user can see their progress and gets motivated to improve his/her results. Besides, a user can view a detailed statistic about passed challenges as an average value.
Kinesii - sports/athletics/health/wellness business-to-customer platform. Vendors place ads offering their services and consumers find these ads and pay for them via the hybrid mobile app.
Several tips from UDTech on how to build the best dashboard
To ensure that the set of numbers, graphs and other visual elements provided in the dashboard are clear and easy to understand for the end users, it will take much more than one iteration. If you decide to create a dashboard for an education app, you will have to follow a specific plan and make the following steps.
1. Identify the target audience. The level of information display and the time periods for the dynamics of the indicators depend on the end user of the dashboard. There are three types of dashboards:
Operating. Operational panels serve to display rapidly changing information.
The analytical dashboard is used to research current trends, to assess the situation and to make conclusions to correct negative patterns.
Strategic dashboard, usually, is used as a guide for determining the direction of the company’s activity, identifying problems in structural units and setting tasks for their correction.
2. The main feature of the dashboard is an array of data, presented in a visual form, in the form of tables, graphs, and elements of infographics. The design phase is crucial for specifying the details and determining possible solutions to the user’s problems.
3. The next stage is prototyping. Prototyping the future product allows you to test the hypotheses of the proposed solutions and logical sequences of user actions.
4. Choosing a color palette is an important step that can make the interface of the dashboard more user-friendly and evoke positive emotions. As a rule, the color palette must be light, non-contrast, and should consist of only two primary colors and their different shades.
5. The final step is testing the solutions. As a rule, the focus group, involved in testing, consists of independent users. They are asked different questions, like:
For whom a dashboard is created?
What decision do you need to take?
After users of the product have tested it, you will have to decide the veracity/falsity of the proposed hypotheses.
All the work on designing, prototyping and developing the dashboard is ultimately aimed at solving problems and satisfying the needs of the target audience. The result will depend directly on the experience and professionalism of the experts who will be entrusted with your project.
So choose wisely! If you still have any questions or need to specify some information concerning the creation of dashboards, we are here to help you.