#lak12 Side effect or main effect?

I'm enjoying the examples of how visualisation of student data is used to let teachers improve their course...
The software is good at presenting data in a way that makes it easy to get an overview, and the teachers are good at understanding their course content, their students, their context and, thus, good at coming up with measures to improve their education.

A positive side effect is that visualizing student data lures the teachers into thinking more carefully about questions like: what am I trying to achieve? what kind of student behaviour would I like to see? and how can I make that happen? It lures teachers into spending more time at carefully designing their education...

Thinking on further, I'm starting to wonder whether this is a side effect or a main effect. When I teach instructional design this is the behaviour that I would like to see in my students: that they spend time and effort (over and over again) on carefully thinking about what they are trying to achieve, monotoring whether these goals are reached, and keep on trying to improve their education....

In practice, a teacher can never pay attention to all problems and never try out all solutions. I am satisfied with teachers that just pick out one or two points and work on those, and pick one or two other points next time. My experience is, that it is often not that relevant which problems you start with, as long as you keep on trying to improve something.

So once I have lured teachers into spending that time and effort, I don't mind if we switch the software off :-)?