Learning Dashboards for Academic Advising in Practice

Academic advisors want to provide students with appropriate support or recommendations in their journey towards or in higher education. The chapter presents a journey of bringing learning analytics to advising practice. First, the chapter shares the successful experience of an institution-wide implementation of an advising dashboard supporting advising dialogues between academic advisors and students. This dashboard empowers advisors by providing data-based support using descriptive visualisations of readily available student progress data. The different steps towards this successful implementation including a description of the challenges encountered, are being presented. Second, the chapter shares the ongoing efforts of bringing predictive analytics, relying on AI algorithms, to advising practice. An approach building on explainable AI, which aims at providing explanations of black-box predictions, and interactive visualisations is presented.