Even highly motivated undergraduates drift off their STEM career pathways. In large introductory STEM classes, instructors struggle to identify and support these students. To address these issues, we developed co-redesign methods in partnership with disciplinary experts to create high-structure STEM courses that better support students and produce…

Educational outcomes from traditionally underrepresented groups are generally worse than for their more advantaged peers. This problem is typically known as the awarding gap (we use the term awarding gap over 'attainment gap' as attainment places the responsibility on students to attain at equal levels) and continues to pose a challenge for…

Despite the importance of academic counselling for student success, providing timely and personalized guidance can be challenging for higher education institutions. In this study, we investigate the impact of counselling instances supported by a learning analytics (LA) tool, called TrAC, which provides specific data about the curriculum and grades…

Simulation-based learning provides students with unique opportunities to develop key procedural and teamwork skills in close-to-authentic physical learning and training environments. Yet, assessing students' performance in such situations can be challenging and mentally exhausting for teachers. Multimodal learning analytics can support the…

To ensure the validity of an assessment programme, it is essential to align it with the intended learning outcomes (LO). We present a model for ensuring assessment validity which supports this constructive alignment and uses learning analytics (LA). The model is based on LA that include a comparison between ideal LO weights (expressing the…

As universities around the world have begun to use learning management systems (LMSs), more learning data have become available to gain deeper insights into students' learning processes and make data-driven decisions to improve student learning. With the availability of rich data extracted from the LMS, researchers have turned much of their…

Learning analytics (LA) is an emerging area that has had extensive development in higher education in recent years, focused both on the learning process of students within subjects and on monitoring their trajectories in training programmes. However, most of the developments remain in the pilot phase without reaching institutional adoption. This…

Several studies have indicated that stakeholder engagement could ensure the successful adoption of learning analytics (LA). Considering that researchers and tech developers may not be aware of how LA tools can derive meaningful and actionable information for everyday use, these studies suggest that participatory approaches based on human-centred…

Students' physical and digital lives are increasingly entangled. It is difficult to separate students' "digital" well-being from their offline well-being given that artificial intelligence increasingly shapes both. Within the context of education's fiduciary and moral duty to ensure safe, appropriate and effective digital learning spaces…

With the widespread use of learning analytics (LA), ethical concerns about fairness have been raised. Research shows that LA models may be biased against students of certain demographic subgroups. Although fairness has gained significant attention in the broader machine learning (ML) community in the last decade, it is only recently that attention…

Whilst learning analytics is still nascent in most African higher education institutions, many African higher education institutions use learning platforms and analytic services from providers "outside" of the African continent. A critical consideration of the protection of data privacy on the African continent and its implications for…

Social learning analytics (SLA) tools are designed to visually demonstrate online discussions with a goal to foster student engagement. However, empirical studies indicate controversial results of the effect of SLA tools on student engagement. This design-based research designs a student-facing SLA tool to demonstrate discussions from three…

Understanding students' privacy concerns is an essential first step toward effective privacy-enhancing practices in learning analytics (LA). In this study, we develop and validate a model to explore the students' privacy concerns (SPICE) regarding LA practice in higher education. The SPICE model considers "privacy concerns" as a central…

Learning analytics (LA) has demonstrated great potential in improving teaching quality, learning experience and administrative efficiency. However, the adoption of LA in higher education is often beset by challenges in areas such as resources, stakeholder buy-in, ethics and privacy. Addressing these challenges in a complex system requires agile…

Technology integration and learning analytics offer insights to improve educational experiences and outcomes. In advancing these efforts, laws and policies govern these environments placing protections, standards, and developmental opportunities for higher education, students, faculty, and even the nation-state. Nonetheless, evidence of…