Sparking Institutional Change: The Experience of Implementing a Learning Analytics Project in an Online University

Abstract

Learning analytics have gained relevance in online higher education over the last decade, focusing on supporting teaching and learning processes while enhancing students’ academic performance. These methods leverage students’ academic data to inform decision-making and interventions aimed at improving educational outcomes. However, recent research suggests that large-scale learning analytics applications in online courses have primarily focused on describing and predicting student behaviours, with a notable lack of prescriptive approaches to guide specific actions. In this paper, we present the experience of implementing a dashboard project across the entire academic body of an online university. The project seeks to inform institutional change by providing the university’s key decision-makers responsible for teaching with visual representations of classroom activity, promoting improvements in students’ academic performance. It regularly gathers users’ needs and expectations using an iterative development approach to facilitate continuous improvements based on user feedback. Additionally, the project develops a comprehensive scaffolding strategy to support end users in effectively engaging with the dashboards, translating these insights into enhanced teaching practices. By carefully considering the needs and expectations of learning analytics users and providing structured support to transform data into pedagogical improvements, institutions can move beyond descriptive analytics towards a more prescriptive, data-informed educational approach.