Learning Analytics for Co-Creation and Interactive Courseware

This chapter explores the use of learning analytics and their dashboards in higher education. We briefly look at some of the pedagogical theories that underpin, and the teaching solutions that enable, social and dialogic learning and then discuss online learning, drawing heavily on a pan-European research project that we have been working on to illustrate our points. Students’ online interactions create data traces that can be used to measure aspects of learning behaviour in real time at an individual level. The resultant data can be interpreted by educators and others, and we discuss some of the challenges and potential drawbacks this could offer, as well as the potential for offering bespoke support in a timely manner to students or cohorts that learning analytics offers. For this chapter we drew on a large Delphi group of experts from across the globe and from their input we offer a series of insights at each of the main stages of learning analytics: the data collection, the analysis, the interpretation, the actions that follow, and the results. We end by noting that learning analytics will have a key role to play in the future of higher education, but context needs always to be present in interpretation: understanding students and their learning must never be reduced to data traces and statistics alone.