Architecting for Learning Analytics: Innovating for Sustainable Impact

Learning analytics is an academic field that has been taking shape under that banner since around 2010, and it has featured regularly in reports on learning technology futures over the years. It sits at the convergence of learning, analytics, and human-computer interaction. The focus of learning analytics is the application of analytics approaches to gain insight into educational data to improve teaching and learning. Learning analytics will undoubtedly be an advance if this provides new "power tools" for academic researchers -- who have of course studied teaching and learning data in nondigital ways for decades. Such research is a necessary first step to validate the approaches. However, the true potential of learning analytics will be realized when people move from research to development and create human-computer systems that automate this analysis process -- from data capture to visualization and recommendation -- offering better (i.e., more timely, precise, and actionable) feedback to educators, students, instructional designers, and the other stakeholders who constitute the whole learning system.