Learning Analytics for Meaningful Learning

Learning Analytics

Traditionally, big data applied to education has been called academic analytics.  Academic analytics analyzes information about education at the national, international, regional, and institutional level.  The stakeholders in this field are usually governments, large organizations, funding organizations, and university and school administration. The newly emerging field of learning analytics is centered on collecting, analyzing, and reporting on data about learning.  Learning analytics seeks to understand and evaluate faculty and student interactions that will ultimately support the success of learners.  It is primarily focused on building technologies, analytics dashboards, and software for PLEs (personal learning environments) that can track student progress, interactions with others, and then apply algorithms to evaluate and predict academic success or risk of impending failure.   However, a few researchers in the learning analytics community are making the case for using analytics to discern meaningful learning from tracked behaviors.

(Buckingham Shum and Deakin Crick, 2012).