OE4BW Hub North America

PROJECT

An Introduction to Learning Analytics in Higher Education

Learning analytics is seen by industry thought leaders as foundational in facilitating innovations in student retention and success, assessments, and personalized learning in higher education systems in the next three to five years. Indeed, data continue to gather in a variety of institutional data stores – in institutional Learning Management Systems (LMS), Student Information Systems (SIS), and other educational databases – but compared with other sectors, higher education administrators are only recently beginning to explore how these sources of data might be mined to improve teaching and learning. Ethical concerns around the design and implementation of learning analytics projects are the subject of vigorous discussion and debate. Concerns about learning analytics ethics range from issues surrounding student privacy, the sharing of data, informed consent, student profiling, surveillance, and legal compliance.

The concept for my project is to create a course that can be used by faculty, staff, and administrators to learn the fundamental concepts of learning analytics in higher education with a thematic emphasis on ethics and student privacy. The purpose is to educate and empower them to develop and champion learning analytics initiatives in their respective institutions and communities.

Author

Logan Murray, OE4BW mentor

Logan Murray

Logan Murray is a Project Analyst working with the California Virtual Campus-Online Education Initiative (CVC-OEI), a multi-year project aimed at increasing access to and quality of online course offerings across the California community college system. In 2019 he earned his doctorate in education (EdD) from Drexel University with a research focus on the ethical use of learning analytics. Logan Murray is a Project Analyst working with the California Virtual Campus-Online Education Initiative (CVC-OEI), a multi-year project aimed at increasing access to and quality of online course offerings across the California community college system. In 2019 he earned his doctorate in education (EdD) from Drexel University with a research focus on the ethical use of learning analytics.

Mentor

Maninder Jeet Kaur, OE4BW mentor

Maninder Jeet Kaur

Maninder Jeet Kaur (Ph.D) is an academician working at Canadore College in Toronto, Canada. In last 10 years of working in various educational organizations, she has successfully directed initiatives for faculty and staff to learn and use state-of the art educational technologies for new and promising instructional design formats of in-class courses, distance learning courses and administrative functions. She has an established following and in-depth knowledge in the discipline of programming, eLearning and technical writing. She has participated in the development of new interdisciplinary programs of study within eLearning domain. She believes firmly on the concept of technology enhanced human interaction as a key to successful online instruction.

Mentor

Lisa Young, OE4BW mentor

Lisa C. Young

Lisa C. Young (Ph.D.) is the Faculty Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Scottsdale Community College, one of the Maricopa Community Colleges, in Arizona, USA. She is an advocate for student success, leading open educational resources (OER) projects, faculty development and excellence in online instruction. She is currently serving as Co-President of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, a regional node of OE Global. Skilled in instructional design, active eLearning and data-informed practices, she most recently completed a sabbatical on advanced data analytics for higher education.