Educational dashboards are increasingly prevalent, commended, and diverse visualising technologies that display outcomes of datafied educational processes to help students and pedagogical actors ‘keep track’ of learning pathways, alert for deviations, and make interventions, so students remain ‘on track’ (Gašević et al., 2022). Dashboards have long been connected to learning management systems and gained momentum as promising tools in learning analytics, an interdisciplinary field seeking to produce and deploy data-driven technologies and methods for improving education (Guzmán-Valenzuela et al., 2021). Descriptive and pre-emptive dashboards, for instance, are believed to enhance students’ self-monitoring and reduce dropouts as they allow students to reflect on their visualised learning (Safsouf et al., 2021). In response to the heightened attention for educational dashboards and the datafication of education generally, critical scholarship has investigated assumptions and consequences of data-driven technologies in education and called for research that details how such technologies engender (un)foreseen effects in situ (e.g., Jarke & Macgilchrist, 2021). With this contribution, we aim to scrutinise how educational actors relate in the production and deployment of higher distance education dashboards. Distance learning has a history of being organised through (digital) technologies, and existing issues intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic. As educational dashboards were used at universities to alleviate problems, research has predominantly focussed on (dis)advantages of dashboards for distance learning rather than their usage in distance learning (Celik et al., 2022). We examine dashboards from a Dutch university because they are telling cases about data visualisation for and in distance learning. Therefore, this article takes a science and technology studies (STS) approach to critically investigate modes of ordering and their effects (Law, 1994): specific ways of relating to visualising technologies situated in wider educational settings. We focussed on different relations with visuals, i.e., employees doing techno-scientific work to produce visuals and learners learning with the deployed visuals (Burri & Dumit, 2008). We followed insights from visual/digital ethnography during our fieldwork because the pandemic required us to pay close attention to the daily, technology-intensive practices of participants and ourselves (Pink, 2021). The results show modes of producing and learning with higher distance education dashboards in the Netherlands. The cases exemplify a ‘dashboarding of learning’ as well as a ‘learning to dashboard’, meaning that data visualisations enter educational practices and encourage – though not always with success – learners to understand and realise their education in close proximity to the underpinning techno-pedagogical ideas of production teams.

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