This paper examines how higher education researchers approach writing the rationale and justification for their work published in journal articles. A common way for establishing this justification is through claiming a gap, but the problem is that it is often hard to find a research gap, and if it is included, there is too often no explanation for…

International students are a key demographic in UK higher education, yet there is limited literature dedicated to pedagogies for and with international students. We undertook a systematic literature review of journal articles from 2013 to 2019 which presented empirical evidence on specific pedagogic practices relating to international students in…

Background: Driven by the ongoing need to provide high-quality learning and teaching, universities recently have shown an increased interest in using learning analytics (LA) for improving learning design (LD). However, the evidence of such improvements is scarce, and the maturity of such research is unclear. Objectives: This study is aimed to…

This article is written with the recognition that, as higher education studies evolve as a multidisciplinary area of inquiry, there is a need to reflect on the theoretical and practical concerns emerging from conducting higher education research. This is especially the case for early-career researchers who enter this relatively new field of study.…

To understand how the digitalization of higher education influences the inter-relationship between students, teachers, and their broader contexts, research must account for the social, cultural, political, and embodied aspects of teaching and learning in digital environments. "Digital ethnography" is a research method that can generate…

Ethics is a prominent topic in learning analytics that has been commented on from conceptual viewpoints. For a broad range of emerging technologies, systematic literature reviews have proven fruitful by pinpointing research directions, knowledge gaps, and future research work guidance. With these outcomes in mind, we conducted a systematic…

Research based on educational data mining conducted at academic institutions is often limited by the institutional policy with regard to the type of learning management system and the detail level of its activity reports. Often, researchers deal with only raw data. Such data normally contain numerous fictitious user activities that can create a…

There has been an increasing interest in learning analytics (LA) research especially in higher education (HE) in recent years. In this study, we conducted a systematic focused review of research, from 2016 to present, on using analytics in HE (specifically system- or user-generated data) to understand in what way such analytics has been…

This research took place in a U.K. higher education institution. It was concerned with the professional learning of academic staff and examined what enables and encumbers work-based professional learning. A two-stage photovoice methodology was chosen because it presented two advantages. First, it was the best way of including participants in the…

Learning analytics (LA) promises understanding and optimization of learning and learning environments. To enable richer insights regarding questions related to learning and education, LA solutions should be able to integrate data coming from many different data sources, which may be stored in different formats and have varying levels of structure.…

Data analytics in higher education provides unique opportunities to examine, understand, and model pedagogical processes. Consequently, the methodologies and processes underpinning data analytics in higher education have led to distinguishing, highly correlative terms such as Learning Analytics (LA), Academic Analytics (AA), and Educational Data…

This article explores the landscape of artful research in higher education through a critical qualitative content analysis of articles published in 41 higher education journals between 2000 and 2020. An analysis of 218 articles published over a 20-year period found (a) a steady increase in artful approaches to inquiry over time, across all tiers…

For this 15th iteration of the International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2022), the conference was held in Durham, England, with an online hybrid format for virtual participation as well. EDM is organized under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society. The theme of this year's conference is Inclusion,…

When conceived of as both a research strategy and mode to present findings, vignettes can be combined with various qualitative methodologies in higher education research. Rather than being a discipline unto itself, higher education research is best understood as a multi and cross-disciplinary field of study that, we contend, is made richer by its…

With the exponential rise in scientific research as a result of the spread of information technology, there is an emerging need to process and systemize the information contained in such publications in both national and international settings. The academic journals, in paper as well as electronic forms, are the most used channels of academic…