The last project in which I participated at the Information Technology Center (CTI) at ESPOL university in 2018 was LALA. The main objective of this project is as follows:

LALA is intended to improve the quality, efficiency and relevance of Higher Education in Latin America, building local capacities to design, adapt, implement and adopt Learning Analytics tools to improve academic decision making processes.

From LALA Project Website

This project is co-founded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. There are four Latin American universities involved, ESPOL (Ecuador), Universidad de Cuenca (Ecuador), Universidad Austral de Chile (Chile), and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Chile); also, three European institutions, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain), KU Leuven (Belgium), and University of Edinburgh (UK).

I was a member of the Ecuadorian team representing ESPOL university and taking part of the development of visualization tools for the counseling system of ESPOL, based on a previous experience on the implementation of a dashboard related with a learning analytics project in Uruguay. We traveled to the universities partners’ cities to be part of organization and reporting meetings. In my case, before I left CTI to co-found the game development company Aenima Studios and go on the path of music technology projects, I was in Valdivia (Chile), Edinburgh (UK) , and Cuenca (Ecuador) on the mentioned meetings.

Visualization Tool

I implemented a back-end in Node.js for extracting the students data from databases stored in the IT department of ESPOL in order to organize it and show it through a front-end based on d3.js, HTML, CSS, and pure JavaScript. This tool extended the ESPOL counseling system. A public demo can be found here. The high-fidelity prototypes that I designed are shown below.

From the previous images, the left one refers to an organization of the implemented charts based on virtual cards, the right one is the complete tool with every chart in one only place. In the demo, these sections are organized inside a simulated skin of ESPOL counseling system and separated in order to avoid an overwhelmed interaction to the user.

Project in Progress

LALA project will conclude at the end of 2020; nevertheless, the community is growing and it will continue while more partners get into the ways to improve higher education in Latin America. Despite I am not anymore in CTI and LALA, it has been a great experience to connect with talented people and useful knowledge for my current and incoming projects, as well as my professional development.