BELIEFS, VALUES AND EMOTIONS IN PRACTITIONERS’ ENGAGEMENTS WITH LEARNING ANALYTICS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

Internet entrepreneurs, EdTech companies, AI enthusiasts, and other powerful stakeholders around the world have promoted the idea that big data and learning analytics (LA) have the potential to revolutionise education. LA, defined as the continuous measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their context (Gašević et al., 2015, p. 1), is increasingly being used to track and evaluate what students do in internet-mediated environments. A growing body of literature has questioned the benefits attributed to the use of AI-based solutions and raised a number of concerns about the current developments in the education sector. Despite this growing interest among researchers, we know little about how the beliefs, values and feelings of different groups of educational practitioners shape how they engage with AI-driven learning analytics technologies and influence the evolution of the cultures of practice shaping the adoption of learning analytics. In this paper, we report on research that asks: how do culturally situated beliefs, values and emotions shape practitioners’ engagements with narrow AI in different contexts of practice? The research project as a whole examines these cultures of practice across three contrasting contexts. Here we will discuss early findings from one of these contexts – learning analytics in higher education. With insights from this research, we aim to contribute to empower practitioners in higher education and relevant stakeholders to foster the development of critical and reflective data cultures that are able to exploit the possibilities of learning analytics while being critically responsive to their societal implications and limitations.