The need for data-driven decision-making primarily motivates interest in analysing Big Data in higher education. Although there has been considerable research on the value of Big Data in higher education, its application to address critical issues within the sector is still limited. This systematic review, conducted in December 2021 and…

Activity-centric data gather feedback on students' learning to enhance learning effectiveness. The heterogeneity and multigranularity of such data require existing data models to perform complex on-the-fly computation when responding to queries of specific granularity. This, in turn, results in latency. In addition, existing data models are…

Educational analytics tend toward aggregation, asking what a "normative" learner does. In "The Left Hand of Data," educational researchers Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia start from a different assumption--that outliers are, and must be treated as, valued individuals. Berland and Garcia argue that the aim of analytics should…

This paper explores the affordances and constraints of STEM faculty members' instructional data-use practices and how they engage students (or not) in reflection around their own learning data. We found faculty used a wide variety of instructional data-use practices. We also found several constraints that influenced their instructional data-use…

The present work describes the challenges faced during the development of a countrywide Learning Analytics study and tool focused on tracking and understanding the trajectories of Uruguayan students during their first three years of secondary education. Due to the large scale of the project, which covers an entire national educational system,…

The Education-to-Workforce Indicator Framework (E-W Framework), commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and developed in partnership with leading experts representing more than 15 national and community organizations, is designed to encourage greater cross-sector collaboration and alignment across local, state, and national data…

Data-informed decision-making has always been -- and always will be -- a smart approach to policy, including at institutions of higher education. Just over one year since the COVID-19 pandemic radically and abruptly shifted every aspect of higher education, states and institutions are tackling the same student success goals as before, but with…

To successfully implement Learning Analytics (LA) systems within higher education, we need to engage administrators, faculty, and staff alike. This paper is by and primarily for practitioners. We suggest implementation strategies that consider the human factor in adopting new technologies by analyzing the viability of our Learning Analytics…

This case study provides an account of one practical aspect of a 3-year-long learning analytics project, allowing readers to see how a researcher spread the idea of using learner data to improve the scholarship of teaching and learning in the course of research. The case sheds light on the particular challenges in using existing data stored in…