Why a special issue on LA? Learning Analytics (LA) is both a growing trend and an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary twenty-first century teaching and learning that has captured the attention and imaginations of educators, researchers, policymakers, learning designers, and technologists alike. In this age of big data and smart cities, LA brings exciting new possibilities for more agentic, engaging, and equitable educational landscapesor is at least perceived by many to bear such promise. As the use of computers and networked technologies become progressively ubiquitous alongside myriad forms of computermediated educational tools and data sources, LA may indeed offer much potential for enhancing learning agency and effectiveness, pedagogical reflexivity and adaptivity, socio-institutional efficiency and innovativeness. Yet, the challenges ahead are substantial. In response to the broader educational community's growing curiosity and interest in LA and its potential affordances for improving teaching and learning across diverse educational contexts, an inaugural International Symposium and Roundtable on LA was held recently by the National Institute of Education (NIE) with key institutional partners in Singapore. The event brought together four leading international LA scientists and more than a 100 local educational researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to dialogue and debate current advancements and conundrums in the field. Keynote speakers and presenters shared concrete examples and learnings gleaned from a range of LA innovations in tertiary and K-12 educational settings across Australia, North America, Europe, and Singapore. 1 Critical views and provocations were raised around a number of key questions perplexing the field. Specifically, what types of data, reflecting what forms of learning, to what ends, and for whose purposes, agenda, and gains? Issues of taken-for-granted epistemological and methodological assumptions and approaches, ethics, ownership, governance, as well as the opportunities (or lack thereof) for individual sense-making and collective meaningmaking by students and teachers at the educational coalface, and how these might reciprocally inform the iterative (re)design and (re)deployment of LA tools and solutions for diverse communities of learners and educators were also contemplated. While definitive answers remain far from reach, this special issue features a small collection of research papers and letters that directly engage with a number of these pertinent issues. With this journal's broader readership of educational researchers, policymakers, and pedagogues beyond the immediate Learning Sciences and Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) community in mind, we first draw attention to some notable milestones in the emergence of the LA field, highlight common definitional understandings,