A new dawn for learning analytics in UK HE

An excellent paper has been produced by Jisc: Learning analytics - The current state of play in UK higher and further education.

Twelve universities and colleges are reviewed, and there is little common ground among the participating institutions in the analytics systems they are using.

The 'outcomes' are:   

Most interviewees are reluctant to claim any significant outcomes from their learning analytics activities to date – again perhaps demonstrating that it is still early days for the technologies and processes.

Several of the participants mention the strong correlation they have found between attendance and achievement. At Manchester Metropolitan it was found that students who submit assignments at the last minute or who have a high proportion of off - campus night time activity are more likely to fail.

Oxford Brookes finds that their dashboards have helped to identify issues with BME achievement on particular courses.

Derby has used analytics to dissect attainment across its student population in order to throw a spotlight on areas where it can target interventions. It can evidence impact on BME as well as overall student attainment.

Both East London and Bedfordshire report that anecdotally student attendance seems to have increased, perhaps because students know that their presence is being monitored.

Encouragingly, at Nottingham Trent the interventions taken by tutors as a result of the analytics are almost always followed by an improvement in engagement. In addition some of the tutors there present the individual student dashboards to the whole tutorial group to prompt discussions about progress  –and this is reportedly motivational to the students.

Several interviewees have found that a significant outcome of the analytics work has been improved connections between disparate parts of their organisations. Some, such as Loughborough and Activate Learning, also mention the sense of ownership that staff feel over the tools or the positive reception they have received, and how important this has been in their adoption.