Vocational Education and Training (VET) suffers from an increasing rate of student dropout in the school sector, while it is largely neglected in the learning analytics (LA) research. At the same time school dropout rates are consistently rising globally and researchers are trying to better understand this rising phenomenon. Some concentrate on its relation to chronic absenteeism from school and to the student socioeconomic background. In addition, other contextual factors can come into play to explain this complex and challenging social phenome-non. Research also shows that the use of LA could contribute to alleviating school dropout. The main purpose of this paper is to present a LA system that visualizes student dropout in the VET school context providing the rea-sons behind it. The paper describes both the backend and the frontend of the system. Regarding the former, the paper focuses on the LA system design and architecture. Regarding the latter, it presents a set of interactive LA visualisations provided by our system based on existing student data on school dropout. In particular, the paper demonstrates its LA visualisations via a case study in a large VET school in Greece based on student data gathered from four consecutive school years. The LA visualisations show students’ dropouts across years in the school unit, trajectories of students’ dropouts in a specific school year, and the degree of the association between some geographical area (as the area of student residence) with chronic absenteeism. © 2024 e-Learning and Digital Learning. All Rights Reserved.
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