Learning Analytics: The Role of Information Technology for Educational Process Innovation

Abstract

Today, trends and advancements in information and communication technologies have proven to be indispensable towards achieving the goals of modern educational models and processes. On the one hand, there is a need for educators to adopt new technologies in support of different activities that constitute the educational processes; ranging from the changing higher institutional labour market to the rapid renovation of information systems and tools used to support the learners. Moreover, such a requirement also relates to the several educational communities that are expected to include a more proactive and creative learning strategies and experiences for the stakeholders (e.g. teachers and students). On the other hand, this paper shows that to meet those needs, Learning Analytics (LA) which implies measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about the progress of stakeholders and contexts in which learning takes place is of importance. To this end, this paper proposes a Learning Analytics Educational Process Innovation model (LAEPI) that leverages the ever-increasing amount of data that are recorded and stored about the different learning activities and digital footprints of users within the educational settings. This is done in order to provide a method that shows to be useful towards maintaining a continuous improvement and monitoring of the educational processes or platforms. Thus, the term Educational Process Innovation. Technically, the work illustrates implication of the method in real-time using dataset about online learning activities of university students for its experimental analysis and results.