Leadership and Maturity: How Do They Affect Learning Analytics Adoption in Latin America?

Abstract

Learning analytics (LA) can provide useful information for addressing the educational needs in Latin American universities, such as reducing program quality disparities and student dropout rates. Some researchers have suggested to build capacity in this region for institutional adoption of LA tools. Yet, there is still a long way to move from experimentation to actual integration of LA tools into institutional processes. With the objective of understanding how we could facilitate LA adoption in Latin American contexts, we present the cases of four Latin American universities adapting LA tools to meet institutional needs. Two questionnaires with open-ended questions were used to identify similarities and differences among the four cases in terms of two dimensions: (1) leadership processes to involve diverse stakeholders in the adoption of LA tools and (2) organizational maturity to analyze and act upon educational data. Findings indicate that leadership processes for LA adoption that engage middle managers, such as deans and directors of undergraduate studies, facilitated the involvement of intended users to receive feedback on the design and of senior managers to allocate resources for scaling up the LA initiative. Besides, a greater organizational maturity facilitated the incorporation of the LA tool into an existing academic process at a department or institutional level. Future work might explore how leadership processes and organizational maturity evolve in other Latin American universities, in order to provide guidelines and recommendations for scaling LA adoption in different contexts.