While many universities and research learning analytics initiatives are responding with cross-institutional strategies and large scale projects, they largely focussed on pedagogical and administrative needs, with little room for student voice. The ‘Learning Analytics Report Card’ (LARC) project aligns directly with the interest in student experience by developing a student-focused analytics tool.

The LARC captures data from an individual student’s activity in Moodle, and presents a summary of their academic progress in the form of a text-based report. Rather than utilising hidden and inaccessible methods, the LARC offers students an opportunity to play with their own data; to choose what is included or excluded, and when the report is generated. The LARC was tested and piloted on the MSc Digital Education programme in 2016, however it is currently limited in scope. The objectives (see below) will enable this innovative project to:

• Increase impact across the University, deploying in a range of participating ODL programmes.
• Develop meaningful ways of combining VLE and social media data in analytics.
• Explore student-focused learning analytics, and ways of ‘humanising’ automated feedback at scale.

The LARC provides practical and interactive ways for students to participate in the development of learning analytics at Edinburgh, as well as enhancing digital literacy related to the issues of data capture, privacy and surveillance. Preparing our learners for a future in which data analysis increasingly accompanies social life, work, education, and well-being is a crucial task.

Objectives

• Develop capacity to capture and analyse data from a broader range of student learning activity including the Learn VLE and other social media e.g. WordPress blogs; establish ways to integrate both VLE and ‘personal’ data productively for meaningful analytics.
• Create ‘personalities’ for the reports: identify the kind of language that students prefer in automatically generated reports; determine appropriate ‘voice’ for automated feedback.
• Deploy the LARC in identified ODL programmes.