Social Learning Analytics in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Environments: A Systematic Review of Empirical Studies

Social learning analytics (SLA) is a promising approach for identifying students’ social learning processes in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments. To identify the main characteristics of SLA, gaps and future opportunities for this emerging approach, we systematically identified and analyzed 36 SLA-related studies conducted between 2011 and 2020. We focus on SLA implementation and methodological characteristics, educational focus, and the studies’ theoretical perspectives. The results show the predominance of SLA in formal and fully online settings with social network analysis (SNA) a dominant analytical technique. Most SLA studies aimed to understand students’ learning processes and applied the social constructivist perspective as a lens to interpret students’ learning behaviors. However, (i) few studies involve teachers in developing SLA tools, and rarely share SLA visualizations with teachers to support teaching decisions; (ii) some SLA studies are atheoretical; and (iii) the number of SLA studies integrating more than one analytical approach remains limited. Moreover, (iv) few studies leveraged innovative network approaches (e.g., epistemic network analysis, multimodal network analysis), and (v) studies rarely focused on temporal patterns of students’ interactions to assess how students’ social and knowledge networks evolve over time. Based on the findings and the gaps identified, we present methodological, theoretical and practical recommendations for conducting research and creating tools that can advance the field of SLA

Designing Learning Analytics Tools for Teachers with Teachers - A Design-Based Research Study in a Blended Higher Education Context

The overall aim of this doctoral thesis is to explore how Learning analytics (LA) uptake by and relevance to teachers can be improved by their engagement in the planning, design, and implementation of theoretically grounded LA tools and interventions in authentic teaching practices. The questions addressed in this thesis are as follows: What is the current practice of learning design among teachers, and what is the state of teachers’ awareness, acceptance, needs, challenges, and beliefs regarding applying LA to support their learning design decisions? What is the potential for different forms of analytics to provide insights into students’ learning that teachers can then use to make pedagogical decisions? How can we design and implement empirical and theoretically based LA tools together with teachers to meet teachers’ pedagogical expectations? Article 1 explores the challenges facing teachers’ adoption of LA and the existing strategies to overcome them. The findings show that teachers struggle to make sense of analytics, and analytics systems are usually atheoretical and not aligned with their pedagogical practice. Article 2 explores teachers’ course design practices and their perceptions of LA as a potential tool for supporting their practice. The findings show that a number of factors, including situational factors, summative and formative assessments, and teachers’ intuition and experience, underpins teachers’ course design practices. Teachers also appreciate the formative and normative value of LA in providing more objective evidence of students’ learning patterns and shaping learning processes. The findings from this study were synthesized to form a bi-directional LA course design conceptual framework. Article 3 examines the potential of different forms of analytics (checklist and process analytics) to support teachers’ learning design decisions. The findings show that if shared in a simple and timely manner and integrated within the same teaching environment, LA visualizations can provide insights into students’ online learning processes, which teachers can use to make learning design changes. Moreover, v the different data sources and analytical techniques used in this article show how researchers can move from low levels of abstraction (such as counting page views) toward higher-level constructs (such as identifying discourse patterns). Article 4 is an intervention in seven courses using the Canvas Analytics Dashboard (CADA), which was designed by the researcher together with the teachers. The findings reveal that engaging teachers in the design of and giving them control over LA tools can favor teachers’ adoption of LA in their everyday practice. The findings further show that teachers are able to make timely learning design changes based on the insights they gain from the dashboard

"Water as a development constraint : the case of Lwebitakuli subcounty, Sembabule district, Uganda"

This is a qualitative study that explores people‟s perspectives of water as a constraint to socio-economic development in Lwebitakuli sub-county, Sembabule District, South western Uganda. Three main research questions were explored: What are the features of socio-economic development in Lwebitakuli? What is the role of water in development? How do people perceive or describe water as a development concern? And what strategies has government, NGOs and community members adopted to cope with the challenges and improve water supply in Lwebitakuli? Data was collected by a triangulation of methods such as; semi-structured interviews, observation and focus group discussions. Interviewees included, community members (both men and women) district water officers, water committee members and community leaders. The main findings suggest that water is of much importance to the socio-economic development of Lwebitakuli although the importance attached differed between the different gender groups. For example men looked at water as necessary for their productive economic activities, while women saw it as a necessity to performing their daily domestic activities. Despite the fact that, the right to water is a human right and accessibility is of paramount importance, the study found that, the majority of people in Lwebitakuli did not have access to safe water with coverage of 21% only. It was further revealed that, the most common water sources were boreholes and dams but these were broken and non-functional. This meant that, different users especially men walked long distances up to 20kms in extreme cases in search of water, which wastes the productive time for work. Schools too were significantly affected with children spending substantial school time searching for water for their personal and teacher use at school. Some strategies such as water harvesting, boreholes and ponds have been applied but still, they have had limited impact on the problem. The study concluded that, water is a major constraint to socio-economic development in Lwebitakuli since it affects most of the key sectors of development such as health, education and people‟s major economic activities. The study recommended that, stakeholders like the government need to take appropriate measures to ensure, sustainable access to water in Lwebitakuli through specific action areas such as increasing funding to water projects, encouraging rain water harvesting, investment in new water facilities, rehabilitating viable point sources such as dams and boreholes as well as increasing participation of local people in water resource planning and management

Mobile learning policy and practice in Africa: Towards inclusive and equitable access to higher education

This article presents the results of a review of practice and policy in relation to mobile learning and its potential to enhance inclusive and equitable access to higher education in Africa. We reviewed academic literature on potential barriers. Then, we explored the current state of the mobile learning policy environment in 10 African countries through an analysis of how these policies have tried to address the prominent challenges in the adoption of mobile learning as identified in the literature. The findings reveal that significant resourcing inequalities and epistemological, sociocultural, and institutional barriers remain and affect mobile learning adoption. The analysis also reveals that there is still a policy vacuum in relation to mobile learning specific policies within African higher education institutional and governmental policies. Thus, the formal integration of mobile learning in higher education to facilitate equitable access is very much in its infancy. This article suggests a strong need for institutional, cross-institutional, national and African-wide mobile learning specific policies to ensure better implementation of mobile learning. As interest in mobile learning continues to grow, this review will provide insights into policy and strategic planning for the adoption of mobile learning to achieve inclusive and equitable access to higher education

Data privacy on the African continent: Opportunities, challenges and implications for learning analytics

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 learning analytics in African higher education is therefore needed. In this paper, we map the current state of legal and regulatory environments and frameworks on privacy to establish their implications for learning analytics. This scoping review of privacy regulations in 32 African countries, complemented by 15 scholarly papers, revealed that there are numerous national and regional legislation and regulatory frameworks, providing clear pointers pertaining to (student) data privacy to governments, higher education institutions and researchers. As such, the findings of this research have implications for African higher education to ensure not only legal compliance but also to oversee and safeguard student data privacy as part of their fiduciary duty. This research provides crucial insights regarding the importance of context for thinking about the expansion and institutional adoption of learning analytics

CADA: a teacher-facing learning analytics dashboard to foster teachers’ awareness of students’ participation and discourse patterns in online discussions

Despite the potential of learning analytics (LA) to support teachers’ everyday practice, its adoption has not been fully embraced due to the limited involvement of teachers as co-designers of LA systems and interventions. This is the focus of the study described in this paper. Following a design-based research (DBR) approach and guided by concepts from the socio-cultural perspective and human-computer interaction (HCI), we design, test, and evaluate a teacher-facing LA dashboard, the Canvas Discussion Analytics Dashboard (CADA), in real educational settings. The goal of this dashboard is to support teachers’ roles in online environments through insights into students’ participation and discourse patterns. We evaluate CADA through 10 in-depth interviews with university teachers to examine their experiences using CADA in seven blended undergraduate and graduate courses over a one-year period. The findings suggest that engaging teachers throughout the analytics tool design process and giving them control/agency over LA tools can favour their adoption in practice. Additionally, the alignment of dashboard metrics with relevant theoretical constructs allows teachers to monitor the learning designs and make course design changes on the fly. The teachers in this study emphasise the need for LA dashboards to provide actionable insights by moving beyond what things are toward how things should be. This study has several contributions. First, we make an artefact contribution (e.g. CADA), an LA dashboard to support teachers with insights into students’ online discussions. Second, by leveraging theory, and working with the teachers to develop and implement a dashboard in authentic teaching environments, we make an empirical, theoretical and methodological contribution to the field of learning analytics and technology-enhanced learning. We synthesise these through practical design and implementation considerations for researchers, dashboard developers, and higher education institutions

A checklist to guide the planning, designing, implementation, and evaluation of learning analytics dashboards

Abstract Higher education institutions are moving to design and implement teacher-facing learning analytics (LA) dashboards with the hope that instructors can extract deep insights about student learning and make informed decisions to improve their teaching. While much attention has been paid to developing teacher-facing dashboards, less is known about how they are designed, implemented and evaluated. This paper presents a systematic literature review of existing studies reporting on teacher-facing LA dashboards. Out of the 1968 articles retrieved from several databases, 50 articles were included in the final analysis. Guided by several frameworks, articles were coded based on the following dimensions: purpose, theoretical grounding, stakeholder involvement, ethics and privacy, design, implementation, and evaluation criteria. The findings show that most dashboards are designed to increase teachers’ awareness but with limited actionable insights to allow intervention. Moreover, while teachers are involved in the design process, this is mainly at the exploratory/problem definition stage, with little input beyond this stage. Most dashboards were prescriptive, less customisable, and implicit about the theoretical constructs behind their designs. In addition, dashboards are deployed at prototype and pilot stages, and the evaluation is dominated by self-reports and users’ reactions with limited focus on changes to teaching and learning. Besides, only one study considered privacy as a design requirement. Based on the findings of the study and synthesis of existing literature, we propose a four-dimensional checklist for planning, designing, implementing and evaluating LA dashboards

Combining Checkpoint and Process Learning Analytics to Support Learning Design Decisions in Blended Learning Environments

Learning analytics (LA) constitutes a key opportunity to support learning design (LD) in blended learning environments. However, details as to how LA supports LD in practice and information on teacher experiences with LA are limited. This study explores the potential of LA to inform LD based on a one-semester undergraduate blended learning course at a Norwegian university. Our findings indicate that creating valuable connections between LA and LD requires a detailed analysis of student checkpoints (e.g., online logins) and process analytics (e.g., online content and interaction dynamics) to find meaningful learning behaviour patterns that can be forwarded to teachers in retrospect to support the redesign of courses. Moreover, the teachers in our study found the LA visualizations to be valuable for understanding student online learning processes, but they also requested the timely sharing of aggregated LA visualizations in a simple, easy-to-interpret format, yet detailed enough to be informative and actionable. We conclude the paper by arguing that the potential of LA to support LD is improved when multiple levels of LA are considered

Overcoming Challenges to the Adoption of Learning Analytics at the Practitioner Level: A Critical Analysis of 18 Learning Analytics Frameworks

Learning analytics (LA) is a fast-growing field but adoption by teachers remain limited. This paper presents the results of a review of 18 LA frameworks and discusses how they have tried to address prominent challenges in LA adoption. The results show that researchers have made significant advances in developing appropriate frameworks to conceptualise LA adoption among teachers, and have advanced considerably in connecting LA and learning theory. However, few frameworks are concretised into technological artefacts and concrete data streams. Moreover, there is a need to empirically validate and put into use the most promising existing frameworks. We hope that this review will be informative for teachers who have little LA experience but are interested in adopting LA in authentic practice

‘My Point of Departure for Analytics is Extreme Skepticism’: Implications Derived from An Investigation of University Teachers’ Learning Analytics Perspectives and Design Practices

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