Learning Analytics: A Foundation for Informed Change in Higher Education

Higher education faces numerous challenges in improving teaching and learning, funding research, and increasing accountability, completion rates, and global competitiveness. Making effective decisions about resource allocations to serve university strategies is an increasingly complex challenge. In spite of collecting enormous amounts of student data, universities are largely ignoring the decision-support benefits and insight available through effective analysis of that data. At a classroom or course level, learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts for the purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs. At a university level, learning analytics can help administrators better understand how institutional data can serve as an effective foundation for driving change. This presentation will offer a broad introduction to the concept of learning analytics, detail practical implementations, and discuss future options for an analytics-focused university.