Chats and threaded forums dominate how we run online discussions in education. But the quality varies widely and it’s impossible for teachers to tell at a glance if learning is going on. In this article, we introduce new kinds of learning analytics that support Knowledge Building discourse.

“We know feedback is of paramount importance to help students learn to write and improve their writing skills, but providing good formative feedback is a lot of work for educators. In this blog post, I’ll share what we’re learning about the effective use of automated feedback tools in teaching.”

“Designed well, dashboards help students succeed academically. Dashboards can also, however, unintentionally undermine students’ academic motivation. This is potentially disastrous, because before learning happens, students must be motivated to learn…”

“As new educational technologies are developed, how do we know they are working? Where does the science of learning fit into design and data analysis?”

“It was expected by some that once learners had access to learning dashboards, their learning performance would skyrocket. An easy win, right? Unfortunately, this didn’t turn out to be the case.”