The Future of Education

In the increasingly competitive and changing world, efficient education system that drives the human development in the country is the key to a nation’s progress. The education providers – schools and higher learning institutions must focus on student success and design instruction that considers the individual differences of the learners. In recent years, learning analytics has emerged as a promising area of research that extracts useful information from educational databases to understand students’ progress and performance. The term Learning Analytics is defined as the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of information about learners and their contexts for the purposes of understanding and optimizing learning.  As the amount of data collected from the teaching-learning process increases, potential benefits of learning analytics can be far reaching to all stakeholders in education including students, teachers, leaders and policy makers. Educators firmly believe that if properly leveraged, learning analytics can be an indispensable tool to narrow the achievement gap, increase student success and improve the quality of education in the digital era. A number of investigations have been conducted and reported the strategies, techniques, and approaches of learning analytics in the literature. This paper examines the recent attempts to conduct systematic and multidisciplinary research in learning analytics and present their findings. The paper also identifies privacy concerns and ethical issues and recommends further research and development in this area.

Keywords: Learning analytics; student achievement; instructional design; educational databases;