Situating learning analytics pedagogically: towards an ecological lens

Abstract

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,

'Too Gay for Facebook'

“…Presenting oneself on multiple social media platforms [17,55,63] shares many characteristics with domains studied using ecological lenses (e.g. [14,57]). A user's self-presentation behavior can be conceptualized as depending on interplays between components of their personal social media ecosystem as they exist both on specific platforms and throughout the ecosystem.…”

Collaboration Analytics Need More Comprehensive Models and Methods: An Opinion Paper

“…This framework is based on Bronfenbrenner's (1979) well-known ecological systems theory, which posits (1) that humans develop in a complex world with multi-layered and interrelated systems such as family and school and (2) that "our knowledge of development" depends on its "context, culture, and history" (Darling, 2007, p. 204). In line with Bronfenbrenner's theory, Pei-Ling Tan and Koh (2017) posit that a classroom (an element in their framework) can be considered as a microsystem, constructed within time as part of the chronosystem. That is, activities and interactions in the classroom can be cumulative and change over time.…”

“…The last relationship concerns interactions between students' collaboration and learning process and the learning content (Pei-Ling Tan & Koh, 2017). It refers to students' participation in collaboration activities consisting of "learning content" and "learning experiences" planned and facilitated by teachers and encompasses peer-to-peer interaction within groups (Pei-Ling Tan & Koh, 2017, p. 6).…”

“…To achieve this, perspectives and models from fields related to collaboration analytics are reviewed, with a focus on neglected areas. To shed light on these areas, we apply Pei-Ling Tan and Koh's (2017) lens from the field of education, which 1 The wheel and spoke model is a type of spiral model for faster and multiple iterations of small teams (Ruparelia, 2010).…”

Looking for the “More Knowledgeable Other” through Learning Analytics

“…The appropriate indices that will provide useful information for upgrading educational planning need to be identified. The implication of Learning Analytics and the evaluation of its impact on learning is one of the key challenges of the educational filed (Tan, & Koh, 2017). Furthermore, educational success and failure have been related to the quality of learners' educational dialogue (Ferguson, & Shum, 2012).…”