Student-Facing Dashboard - Scale up. Insights from the second year of implementation

This report presents findings from the second year of piloting (2024/5) of the OU’s Student Facing Dashboard (SFD) with OU students. In the first year of the project (2023/4), a dashboard was codesigned with OU students presenting descriptive, predictive and prescriptive data – the latter is a unique feature of the OU’s dashboard and one not found in dashboards of other institutions, and it refers to the provision of remedial action to students in the form of material recommendations and support contact details that can help to improve study performance and TMA submission. In the second year of SFD testing which we report here, APS allocated £106K to the project to scale up the piloting in all five Level 1 modules in FBL[1] and capture impact on perceptions, retention and performance. Additionally, the Level 2 module that participated in Year 1 activities expressed strong interest in carrying on testing the SFD in Year 2 due to observed increases in retention and progression during their engagement with SFD in its first year. A mixed-methods approach drawing from 183 surveys and 30 follow-up interviews, analysed via descriptive statistics, thematic analysis, as well as a propensity score matching analysis, showed robust evidence of positive impact on student performance, retention, passing rates and the overall experience of studying from a distance. Notably, SFD was shown to be particularly beneficial for Access, Participation, and Success (APS) students, especially Black students.