Dear friends and colleagues,

 We are writing to announce a call for papers on "The role of learning analytics in supporting student outcomes" for Volume 31 of Research in Education and Learning Innovation Archives (REALIA), which will be coordinated by Dr Rachel Maxwell.

The aim of this special issue is to explore the ways in which the use of engagement or learner analytics within higher education impacts student outcomes and retention. It will focus specifically on exploring how universities are using data on student engagement with educationally purposeful activities to provide meaningful opportunities to enhance student outcomes, seeking to critically evaluate the benefits (moral, financial and other) of using targeted data in this way and exploring the future role(s) of engagement analytics.

While the identified potential for learner analytics to change student engagement practices is high, until recently, there has been little evidence of this potential in practice (Viberg, Hatakka, Bälter and Mavroudi, 2018). Exploring whether more of this potential has been or can be realised is key if Higher Education Institutions are to effectively support and enhance student outcomes. The global Covid-19 pandemic thrust the need to understand the links between engagement and attainment into centre stage. The subsequent use of synchronous and asynchronous learning and teaching opportunities via digital means has had both positive and negative impacts. For some staff and students, the forced reliance upon technology resulting from Covid-19 provided new and innovative ways to learn, to teach and to provide effective pastoral support at a distance. For others, this reliance on digital means proved an obstacle to engagement and impacted negatively on how students connect with their university, their academic studies and their peers (Summers, Higson and Moores, 2022).

It is therefore timely to explore the roles that engagement or learner analytics can play in enabling universities to better understand how their students are learning and deploy resources accordingly. Those insights will differ according to academic discipline, to the ways in which academic staff teach and how students learn. More broadly, it is pertinent to critically reflect upon the value provided to the higher education sector globally, nationally and locally from the focused and constructive use of data to provide just-in-time insights into both student engagement and, equally, the causes of any disengagement.

OBJECTIVE AND SCOPE

This special issue will focus on papers that analyse one or more of the following areas: 

• Does it work? Exploring the causal relationship between analytics and student outcomes
• Can learning analytics tackle societal inequalities and resolve gaps in student outcomes and achievement?
• Using learning analytics as a catalyst for cultural change 
• Does learning analytics pay? An industry-focused critical evaluation of learning analytics identifying future directions and initiatives
• The effectiveness of learning analytics at predicting student outcomes
• Engagement v disengagement: What insights on student disengagement can be gained from better understanding of ‘engagement’?

REFERENCES

Summers, R., Higson, H. and Moores, E. (2022) The impact of disadvantage on higher education engagement during different delivery modes: a pre- versus peri-pandemic comparison of learning analytics data [online]. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.2024793

Viberg, O., Hatakka, M., Bälter, O. and Mavroudi, A. (2018). The current landscape of learning analytics in higher education. Computers in Human Behaviourvol. 89 (December 2018). pp98-110. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.07.027

GUIDELINES FOR AUTHORS

The articles may be written in English, Spanish or Valencian and will be submitted for double-blind peer review. 

Contributors should submit the full version of their article online at: https://www.uv.es/realia. Before submitting your article, you must register on the REALIA website. Please follow the instructions provided in the Guidelines for submission.