Learning Analytics for Educational Innovation: A Systematic Mapping Study of Early Indicators and Success Factors

Abstract

Today, theoretical and practical advancements in information and communication technologies (ICT) have proven to be indispensable towards achieving the goals of modern educational institutions including the underlying process models. There is evidence that existing technologies such as learning analytics (LA) can not only be used to understand the users (e.g. learners) and the context in which learning takes place, but also can take educators further in achieving different learning goals and innovation. On the one hand, there is a need for educators to adopt digital technologies in support of different activities that constitute educational processes; ranging from the changing higher institutional labour market to the rapid renovation of information systems and tools used to support learners. Moreover, such a requirement also relates to an educational community that is expected to include more proactive and creative learning strategies and experiences for the said stakeholders (e.g. teachers and students). On the other hand, this study shows that to meet those needs, learning analytics which implies measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about the progress of stakeholders and learning contexts; is of importance. To this end, this paper conducts a systematic mapping study of current literature to determine trends in learning analytical methods and its application over the past decade. We look at how learning analytics has been used to support improved process monitoring and management (e.g. educational process innovation) within different organizational settings and case studies application. Consequently, this paper proposes a Learning Analytics Educational Process Innovation (LAEPI) model that leverages the ever-increasing amount of data that are recorded and stored about different learning activities or digital footprints of users within the educational domain to provide a method that proves to be useful towards maintaining continuous improvement and monitoring of different educational platforms. Thus, the notion of learning analytics for Educational Process Innovation in this paper. Technically, this work illustrates the implication of the method using dataset about online learning activities of university students for its experimentations and analysis.