Names and Faces: a staff dashboard to support student learning engagement

This paper describes the in-progress development and preliminary evaluation of a dashboard to support student-centred higher education. The dashboard, known as Names and Faces, aims to provide easy access to the data teaching staff need to proactively foster student engagement, and to improve the student’s overall university experience. Names and Faces brings together data from disparate systems, and provides a highly visual interface that meets the needs of a wide range of teaching staff. Importantly, the prototype has been developed by academic staff in collaboration with other academics using an iterative prototyping approach. 48 academic staff have used the prototype over two semesters, identifying new data sources and interfaces to be incorporated in future iterations. This project contributes to the development of improved information support for student-centred education, but also to academic information systems in terms of data integration, usability, and user-centred design.