Twenty-ninth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

Learner analytics have become an established method for gaining greater understanding about the inter-relationships and intersections between curriculum and learner outcomes. They are particularly prevalent in online and blended learning contexts. Some of the more advanced approaches undertake detailed tracking and tracing of what a learner does, when, and how they perform. This provides valuable mappings of the routes that learners take, which underpin the ability to provide informed and tailored guidance to learners at both individual and cohort levels. It is often argued that analytics can also be used to direct the evolution of curricula in order to enhance learner outcomes. But, to do this this requires more than information than a set of learner routemaps - it requires the routemaps to be contextualized within a pedagogic and/or curriculum ‘base map’. Only then can the learning routes the analytics reveal be interpreted in terms of their relationships with the curriculum and pedagogy landscape. Achieving this needs learner analytics to be designed into a comprehensive, coherent and structured learning ecosystem that encompasses pedagogic framing, learning and curriculum design, content design and asset management and learning platform design and data modelling. In this paper we present such an ecosystem that has been developed to support advance learner analytics at the University of Nottingham Online. We show how the different elements of the ecosystem work together to support new insights into how learners interact with their curricula and outline the benefits for this approach for learners and those tasked with enhancing their experiences.