Learner Facing Analytics: Analysis of Student Perspectives

With the focus on academic (rather than student perspectives) in mind and building on the previous Innovative Research Universities (IRU) funded project on The use of Learning Analytics to Support Improvements in Teaching Practice (West, Luzeckyj, Searle, Toohey & Price, 2018), this student-focused project aimed to: explore student understandings and concerns in relation to learning analytics; gather student input on the types of learning analytics reports, dashboards and tools that will be most useful in supporting student success; develop a series of principles to guide institutions in the creation of student-facing dashboards; identify the processes and training required to support students and staff to make sense of the data presented in dashboards and improve student success. To achieve these aims, the IRU conducted a project over two years which had both a research and practical application focus. A core component of this work was a survey of students across the IRU, with 2017 respondents and focus group participation from 34 students (also from across the network). Several journal articles have been produced related to this project including both a theoretical paper (West, Luzeckyj, Toohey, Vanderlelie & Searle, 2020) and a paper outlining the key results (West, Luzeckyj, Toohey, Vanderlelie & Searle, submitted for publication). This report therefore focusses on a more comprehensive presentation of the findings and the resources that were produced.