Everyday learning analytics: Leveraging emerging and existing technologies to enhance educational outcomes

Data and analytics have become powerful tools of tertiary education in the quest to ensure the success of learners and enhance learning environments. Institutions are making substantial investments in the development of centralised analytics systems to map learning cohorts and identify learners at risk. These systems bring together data from multiple sources across the institution and apply new predictive algorithms or visualise the behaviour and performance trends of groups of learners, or apply emerging artificial intelligence models to generate new insights. All these approaches align with the THETA Conference theme of digital acceleration which focuses on “leveraging emerging technologies and big data analytics to enhance educational outcomes”. 
However, a necessary ingredient to justify the investment in applications of these emerging technologies for academic and learning analytics is scale. The result is the development of tools such as dashboards and nudging systems that can be utilised by the largest number of educators to impact the largest number of learners. While this is a noble endeavour, an unintended result is a loss direct connection with the indicators of learning (Gasevic et al., 2016). Additionally, from an inclusion perspective, not all institutions can afford to invest in large learning analytics systems and educators have to make do with what they have to hand.
This is the inspiration for the Everyday Learning Analytics (ELA) project. The goal is to help educators to make use of available technologies, whether old or new, to bring learning analytics into their teaching context. A key part of this approach is to help educators connect their learning design with data available from learning systems and the classroom. The project builds on an exploratory study involving higher and vocational education teachers (Author, 2023) which uncovered a rich appetite for using data and analytics to inform teaching and learning experiences. The intended outcome of the project is to build and share a repository of approaches that can be used by educators worldwide to make ELA accessible and relevant so educational outcomes improve. In this presentation we will provide an update on the project progress, future directions, and ways to get involved.