Competency 1.2

Competency 1.2

Competency 1.2: Define learning analytics and detail types of insight they can provide to educators and learners.

One could define learning analytics as collection of methods that allow teachers and maybe the learners to understand what is going on. I.e. all sorts of data collection, transformation, analysis and visualization tools that allow to gain insight on participant's behaviors and productions (including discussion and reflections). The learning analytics community in their call for the 1st International Conference on learning analytics provides a more ambitious definition: “Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs”. This definition includes a clearly transformative perspective.

Educational data mining is a field that has similar interests, but that focuses more on research. In addition, favorite data gathering, aggregation/clustering, analysis and visualization techniques differ a bit. 

Learning Analytics is something which will help us to process simple data into useful information using different methods. A lot of minute, but useful information may be lost in large amounts of data, which can be extracted using learning analytics. The different methods can help us to convert raw data to a readable form, analyze using required processing and view results using possible visualizations. 

Educators and learners can get a variety of insights using learning analytics such as:
Statistical Analysis
Discourse Analysis
Text processing
Sentiment Analysis
Network Analysis
Prediction models
Machine Learning
Visualization techniques