Learning Dashboard

Funding and current status

The Learning Dashboard originated as a UPC teaching and innovation initiative and received support from the university’s 2021 Call for Educational Innovation Projects program. That specific funding cycle has ended, but the project continues to be ongoing. The team continues to maintain and extend the platform, piloting it in courses, and preparing for wider adoption across UPC and other institutions.

Course deployments

The Learning Dashboard has been used in the following undergraduate courses:

• Web Applications and Services (ASW) — FIB-UPC
• Software Engineering Project (PES) — FIB-UPC
• Ampliació a l’Enginyeria del Programari (AMEP) / Further Software Engineering — EPSEVG-UPC
  

Overview

The Learning Dashboard collects and integrates data from various sources. In its current implementation, it retrieves data from Taiga (e.g., tasks, user stories, epics) and GitHub (e.g., commits, branches) of the projects being developed by the students. Still, it can be extended to include new types of data sources if needed.

From the data collected from these sources, the Learning Dashboard computes several metrics (e.g., ratio of commits per student, modified lines per student, tasks assigned and completed). It aggregates these metrics into factors (e.g., Commit Contribution, Task Contribution). These factors are then used to calculate Strategic Indicators (e.g., Backlog Management, Information Completeness) to provide a holistic overview of the software project's development status.

The Learning Dashboard presents all this information through an appealing and interactive graphical interface, displaying the current status of the project as well as its historical evolution. The Learning Dashboard also categorizes the values of strategic indicators, factors, and metrics (e.g., ‘excellent’, ‘good’, or ‘bad’) based on some predefined thresholds. The teacher can customize these categories and thresholds to easily assess the project's performance.

LD@Taiga

LD@Taiga offers the same analytics directly within the Taiga project management environment. Instead of using a separate web front-end, students and instructors can access indicators where tasks, sprints, and user stories are already managed. This integration reduces context switching and increases the frequency with which evidence is consulted during everyday work.

Outlook

Ongoing work focuses on extending course deployments, developing a customized LD-powered version of Taiga, and exploring enhanced analytics and forecasting features, while maintaining a lightweight and accessible platform for classroom use.