An interactive teacher's dashboard for monitoring groups in a multi-tabletop learning environment

One of the main challenges for teachers in facilitating and orchestrating collaborative activities within multiple groups is that they cannot see information in real time and typically see only the final product of the groups' activity. This is a problem as it means that teachers may find it hard to be aware of the learners' collaborative processes, partial solutions and the contribution of each student. Emerging shared devices have the potential to provide new forms of support for face-to-face collaboration and also open new opportunities for capturing and analysing the collaborative process. This can enable teachers to monitor students' learning more effectively. This paper presents an interactive dashboard that summarises student data captured from a multi-tabletop learning environment and allows teachers to drill down to more specific information when required. It consists of a set of visual real-time indicators of the groups' activity and collaboration. This study evaluates how teachers used the dashboard determine when to intervene in a group. The key contributions of the paper are the implementation and evaluation of the dashboard, which shows a form of learner model from a concept mapping tabletop application designed to both support collaborative learning and capture traces of activity. © 2012 Springer-Verlag