Learning analytics are a common factor in the usage of any well equipped modern learning system. The analytics cover student progress through a course using factors such as lesson completion, quiz completion and scoring, typically to measure student performance. It can be differentiated from the similar method of educational data mining by the fact that rather than machine intelligence making conclusions based on the data, Learning Analytics present the data openly for human scrutiny and conclusions.

A basic learning analytics chart

The basic analytics available today are primarily reactive, in that they report when a student finished a lesson or test, which is useful for knowing if a particular student has completed a course successfully, but it doesn’t give us much help in terms of understanding why a student was successful or unsuccessful in a particular learning path.

Only recently has learning analytics on some platforms expanded to reporting data such as at what point in a video did a student stop watching, or at what step in an assignment or quiz did the student give up. These are extremely important metrics in modern eLearning because they can show us if there is a specific problem within the activity itself that is affecting a majority of learners rather than just making assumptions as to the student’s dedication or needing to guess as to why the course in question seems to be not well tolerated.

inline feedback within a course can be highly effective

Another often overlooked form of analytics is feedback from direct surveying in-app. This is differentiated from the typical surveying that is usually sent by email after a course is complete by being a simple popup within the course itself that catches a student mid-activity with a simple question about how they are finding the activity itself. This method can be invaluable as it captures a student’s thoughts as they are engaged in the activity in question, rather than long after they have moved on and are being asked to think back to a single point of engagement in the entirety of the course. There are a number of modern technology companies that specialize in this kind of proactive in-app engagement such as Pendo or UserIQ. Typically these are employed by businesses as a training tool for technical applications, however I would argue that the same approach to proactive engagement is a valuable tool in a pure educational environment that is seldom used.

Sources:

https://www.northeastern.edu/graduate/blog/learning-analytics/

https://rusc.uoc.edu/rusc/ca/index.php/rusc/article/view/v12n3-calvet-juan/2746.html