Learning Analytics In Education

Learning Analytics in Higher Education provides a foundational understanding of how learning analytics is defined, what barriers and opportunities exist, and how it can be used to improve practice, including strategic planning, course development, teaching pedagogy, and student assessment. Well-known contributors provide empirical, theoretical, and practical perspectives on the current use and future potential of learning analytics for student learning and data-driven decision-making, ways to effectively evaluate and research learning analytics, integration of learning analytics into practice, organizational barriers and opportunities for harnessing Big Data to create and support use of these tools, and ethical considerations related to privacy and consent. Designed to give readers a practical and theoretical foundation in learning analytics and how data can support student success in higher education, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and administrators.

Learning Analytics Goes to School presents a framework for engaging in education research and improving education practice through the use of newly available data sources and analytical approaches. The application of data-intensive research techniques to understanding and improving learning environments has been growing at a rapid pace. In this book, three leading researchers convey lessons from their own experiences—and the current state of the art in educational data mining and learning analytics more generally—by providing an explicit set of tools and processes for engaging in collaborative data-intensive improvement.

​This book focuses on the uses of big data in the context of higher education. The book describes a wide range of administrative and operational data gathering processes aimed at assessing institutional performance and progress in order to predict future performance, and identifies potential issues related to academic programming, research, teaching and learning​. Big data refers to data which is fundamentally too big and complex and moves too fast for the processing capacity of conventional database systems. The value of big data is the ability to identify useful data and turn it into useable information by identifying patterns and deviations from patterns​.

The book aims to advance global knowledge and practice in applying data science to transform higher education learning and teaching to improve personalization, access and effectiveness of education for all. Currently, higher education institutions and involved stakeholders can derive multiple benefits from educational data mining and learning analytics by using different data analytics strategies to produce summative, real-time, and predictive or prescriptive insights and recommendations. Educational data mining refers to the process of extracting useful information out of a large collection of complex educational datasets while learning analytics emphasizes insights and responses to real-time learning processes based on educational information from digital learning environments, administrative systems, and social platforms. This volume provides insight into the emerging paradigms, frameworks, methods and processes of managing change to better facilitate organizational transformation toward implementation of educational data mining and learning analytics. It features current research exploring the (a) theoretical foundation and empirical evidence of the adoption of learning analytics, (b) technological infrastructure and staff capabilities required, as well as (c) case studies that describe current practices and experiences in the use of data analytics in higher education.

The term learning analytics is used in the context of the use of analytics in e-learning environments. Learning analytics is used to improve quality. It uses data about students and their activities to provide better understanding and to improve student learning. The use of learning management systems, where the activity of the students can be easily accessed, potentiated the use of learning analytics to understand their route during the learning process, help students be aware of their progress, and detect situations where students can give up the course before its completion, which is a growing problem in e-learning environments. Advancing the Power of Learning Analytics and Big Data in Education provides insights concerning the use of learning analytics, the role and impact of analytics on education, and how learning analytics are designed, employed, and assessed. The chapters will discuss factors affecting learning analytics such as human factors, geographical factors, technological factors, and ethical and legal factors. This book is ideal for teachers, administrators, teacher educators, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students interested in the use of big data and learning analytics for improved student success and educational environments.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction by an extraordinary range of experts to the recent and rapidly developing field of learning analytics. Some of the finest current thinkers about ways to interpret and benefit from the increasing amount of evidence from learners’ experiences have taken time to explain their methods, describe examples, and point out new underpinnings for the field. Together, they show how this new field has the potential to dramatically increase learner success through deeper understanding of the academic, social-emotional, motivational, identity and meta-cognitive context each learner uniquely brings. Learning analytics is much more than “analyzing learning data”—it is about deeply understanding what learning activities work well, for whom, and when. Learning Analytics in Education provides an essential framework, as well as guidance and examples, for a wide range of professionals interested in the future of learning. If you are already involved in learning analytics, or otherwise trying to use an increasing density of evidence to understand learners’ progress, these leading thinkers in the field may give you new insights. If you are engaged in teaching at any level, or training future teachers/faculty for this new, increasingly technology-enhanced learning world, and want some sense of the potential opportunities (and pitfalls) of what technology can bring to your teaching and students, these forward-thinking leaders can spark your imagination. If you are involved in research around uses of technology, improving learning measurements, better ways to use evidence to improve learning, or in more deeply understanding human learning itself, you will find additional ideas and insights from some of the best thinkers in the field here. If you are involved in making administrative or policy decisions about learning, you will find new ideas (and dilemmas) coming your way from inevitable changes in how we design and deliver instruction, how we measure the outcomes, and how we provide feedback to students, teachers, developers, administrators, and policy-makers. For all these players, the trick will be to get the most out of all the new developments to efficiently and effectively improve learning performance, without getting distracted by “shiny” technologies that are disconnected from how human learning and development actually work.

In education today, technology alone doesn't always lead to immediate success for students or institutions. In order to gauge the efficacy of educational technology, we need ways to measure the efficacy of educational practices in their own right. Through a better understanding of how learning takes place, we may work toward establishing best practices for students, educators, and institutions. These goals can be accomplished with learning analytics. Learning Analytics: From Research to Practice updates this emerging field with the latest in theories, findings, strategies, and tools from across education and technological disciplines. Guiding readers through preparation, design, and examples of implementation, this pioneering reference clarifies LA methods as not mere data collection but sophisticated, systems-based analysis with practical applicability inside the classroom and in the larger world. Case studies illustrate applications of LA throughout academic settings (e.g., intervention, advisement, technology design), and their resulting impact on pedagogy and learning. The goal is to bring greater efficiency and deeper engagement to individual students, learning communities, and educators, as chapters show diverse uses of learning analytics to: Enhance student and faculty performance. Improve student understanding of course material. Assess and attend to the needs of struggling learners. Improve accuracy in grading. Allow instructors to assess and develop their own strengths. Encourage more efficient use of resources at the institutional level. Researchers and practitioners in educational technology, IT, and the learning sciences will hail the information in Learning Analytics: From Research to Practice as a springboard to new levels of student, instructor, and institutional success.

From Data and Analytics to the Classroom presents a coherent framework for useful translation of learning analytics research for educational practice with world-leading researchers in the use of data and analytics in education applying this framework to a number of different educational domains. The aim is to provide concrete ways to apply data and analytics to everyday educational practice. Thi book serves not only as a practical tool, but also as an instructional guide for educators. Through discussion and illustration it provides educators and researchers alike with the proper tools and frameworks to effectively make sense of and use data and analytics in their everyday practice.