Teacher-facing dashboards: insights from research and case studies

Teacher-facing dashboards have become essential tools in modern education, playing an important role in tracking students’ performance, engagement, and learning experiences. This paper aims to identify key features of effective dashboards and explore the impact of teacher-facing dashboards on teaching performance, analytical abilities, and decision-making. We analyzed research practices and exemplary prototypes in teaching, conducting a rapid review on the Scopus database, focusing on the most recent articles and conference proceedings published between 2020 and 2024. Features such as user-centered design, real-time data and alerts, and intuitive visualizations influence dashboard usability and functionality, and determine how meaningful insights can be shared with teachers in an efficient and accessible manner. Some dashboards that integrate with existing Learning Management Systems (LMS) and are co-designed with teachers have shown highly positive results, while AI-driven predictive analytics dashboards, an emerging trend, generate insights for student monitoring and adaptive learning. Despite these capabilities, several challenges to widespread adoption of dashboards remain, such as data complexity, privacy concerns, limited teacher engagement, and scalability issues. The insights from this review will guide future research and the development of a teacher dashboard for online learning environments at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy).