Real-time ICT-based interactive learning analytics to facilitate blended classrooms

Classroom monitoring using information communications technology (ICT) plays a significant role in enhancing teaching-learning in a blended learning environment. Learning analytics (LA) is such a popular classroom monitoring tool. LA helps teachers to the collection, interpretation, and analysis of students performance data generated during teaching and learning process. However, designing interactive LA is challenging for real-time blended classroom use. We observed significant flaws in handling large classroom monitoring challenges in a state-of-the-art system. To address those flaws and challenges, we propose the "Manas Chakshu" - a real-time ICT-based interactive LA for large blended classrooms. The core idea of the visual LA system consists of two interactive levels. The overview and the overview+detail levels are used to optimize the screen-area utilization of the available display. The system computes classroom status with the help of novel weighted states and Euclidian distance for highlighting critical classroom regions. We compare the theoretical performance of our aid with the state-of-the-art system. We found that Manas Chakshu performed better in 89.12% of the cases based on theoretical performance analysis. We also implemented Manas Chakshu as an Android application and conducted an empirical study with 39 teachers. Study results show that our system reduces average classroom monitoring time by 27.96% compared to the state-of-the-art system. We found the perceived usability in terms of teachers' satisfaction, efficiency, and learnability ratings of the proposed system were high. The average mean ratings on a five-point Likert scale are 4.06, 3.86, and 4.02. The results show the perceived usabilities and high system usability scale (SUS) scores (average 76.86) of the proposed system were highly acceptable to the teachers.