The interest in dashboards in schools has been growing in recent years as they have great potential in informing teachers’ and learners’ work, decisions, and practices. In this dissertation, we study the design and use of dashboards to inform teachers’ practices when assisting learners in using online learning platforms. We seek specifically to examine not only what teachers are supposed to do or can do with dashboards, but more importantly what they actually do with such technologies in everyday work and the long run. We argue that this research draws social, pedagogical, and technical implications. On one hand, to understand the social factors, we need a critical inquiry of the pedagogical practices and the technical challenges underpinned by teachers' dashboards. On the other hand, to properly design such technologies, we need a profound understanding and consideration of the social interactions of users. We collaborated with teachers and designers in designing two teacher-centered dashboards; and conducted two longitudinal studies of dashboards in-the-wild to examine the impact of two dashboards on 34 teachers in online language learning settings.

First, we studied dashboards in the context of videoconferencing language learning platforms. Teachers face one main challenge: lack of emotional awareness in online learning due to distant and technology-mediated interactions. We conducted a case study of multimodal awareness cues of learners’ emotions in online learning platforms using: video, audio, self-report, and contextual interactions; and proposed an approach for combining discrete and dimensional models of emotion. We designed Emodash based on interviews with five teachers and refined it through an iterative design process, to foster teachers’ retrospective awareness of learners’ emotions and support them in writing feedback reports to learners. We evaluated its impact over eight weeks of field study with 5 pairs of teacher-learner.

Second, we studied dashboards in the context of distant and blended grammar learning platforms. Teachers face one main challenge: lack of actionable insights to devise and engage in informed interventions with learners. We designed Progdash based on interviews with seven teachers and refined it through collaborative design prototypes, to bridge between learners’ use of an online French grammar and spelling learning platform and teachers’ data-informed pedagogical practices. We evaluated its impact over three months of field study with 29 teachers.

Third, building upon our two studies of Emodash and Progdash, we articulate the social, pedagogical, and technical dimensions interacting with the design and use of teachers' dashboards. We engaged with these three dimensions, to examine the opportunities and challenges that stakeholders may face in the development of teachers’ dashboards.