Abstract
The literature until 2020 has forecasted a significant uptake of learning analytics (LA) to support learning design in higher education. However, there remain only a few investigations into teachers’ course design practices and their perspectives on LA as a tool to support their design practices. This paper presents findings from an examination of 16 university teachers’ design practices and perspectives on LA at two Norwegian universities (The University of Oslo and Oslo Metropolitan University). On one hand, findings identified situational factors, feedback sources and teachers’ intuition as key influencers of teachers’ course design decisions. On the other hand, guided by principles of the technology acceptance model, this study identified mixed reactions amongst teachers regarding the awareness, understanding and potential use of LA to support course design practices. In particular, most teachers appreciated the formative and normative value of LA to provide more objective evidence about students’ learning patterns and to shape learning trajectories, but some were skeptical about the evaluative role where LA is used to evaluate teachers’ and students’ performance based on unnuanced data (e.g. no theory guidance) with limited depth in observation. This article contributes to the understanding of factors fundamental to linking LA to teachers’ course design practices by synthesizing findings to propose a ‘bi-directional LA-course design’ conceptual framework that clarifies key elements that influence teachers’ design practices and highlighting their implications for LA integration.
Highlights
The need to improve the quality of higher education has fostered an interest in integrating technology tools to support teachers’ pedagogical practices (Bennett et al 2015)
Situational factors (e.g. course structure, teaching ‘Online courses take a lot of time to design as commode, class size, student characteristics and learn- pared to face-to-face courses’ (R4)
The findings revealed the prominence of situational factors, feedback systems and teachers’ personal experiences as key influences of teachers’ course design practices
Summary
The need to improve the quality of higher education has fostered an interest in integrating technology tools to support teachers’ pedagogical practices (Bennett et al 2015). LA systems use and analyze learners’ behavioral and interaction data mainly from online learning systems, which enables ecologically more valid research since no interruptions to authentic student learning processes are necessary to collect LA data (Berland et al 2014) From this perspective, the promises of LA are timely, given the increasing spread and use of online learning environments (e.g. learning management systems) for teaching and learning within higher education institutions for purposes like identifying low performing students (Saa et al 2019), monitoring students’ online social learning behaviors (Kaliisa et al 2019) and supporting course design practices (e.g. planning, sequencing, feedback, assessment and redesigning of learning activities) (Rienties and Toetenel 2016). The same concern was reported in a large-scale longitudinal study of 1159 teachers using LA over four years, wherein most teachers found that, the LA system was relatively easy to use, the more difficult decision was how to act on the provided analytics to effectively intervene (Herodotou et al 2019)
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