Designing a learning dashboard to facilitate project development and teamwork in a CBL physics course

There have been, and still are, considerable efforts to stimulate interdisciplinary research to tackle interesting research questions and address some of the complex societal challenges we are facing in the 21st century. Therefore, the current STEM education needs to provide opportunities for students to develop an interdisciplinary mindset and to actively engage them in solving societal issues early on during their degree. With these goals in mind, we designed a set of three interdisciplinary courses focused on the physics of social systems, or Sociophysics, using Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) as an instructional approach. Our aim was to offer students the freedom to define their projects while supporting them with a robust framework capable of helping them rapidly define their challenge (via CBL) and efficiently work on it (via Scrum). Since CBL is a new educational framework for most students and it relies on the students-driven initiative, we designed a learning dashboard specifically aimed at providing efficient feedback and supporting the development of students’ research and teamwork skills. We found our dashboard to be highly effective in providing both qualitative and quantitative support for students' progress in their self-defined projects, allowing scaling-up of CBL-based educational settings.