Learning Analytics (LA), big data, and predictive modeling have rapidly emerged as some of the most promising advancements in helping students succeed during their college years (Carmean 2021) (Ferguson et al.,2014). Questions about our students that we could have only dreamed about getting answers to a few years ago have become increasingly available. At time when dashboards created from Student Information and Learning Management Systems are becoming an integral part of the educational ecosystem for colleges and universities worldwide, so has the need to improve student success (Almond-dannenbring et al., 2022).
During the first Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference, the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SOLAR) defined LA “as the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their context for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs.” As Long and Siemens (2011) so aptly stated, “the most dramatic factor shaping the future of higher education is something that we can’t actually touch, big data and analytics.”
With the advent of LA, it is not unreasonable for SOTL practitioners to now study tens of thousands of students in a single research project. Such studies can often encompass years or even decades of evidence about students, their achievements in courses and curricula, and the choices they make on their pathways toward graduation.
Therefore, it seems reasonable that the ISSOTL community would want to be informed contributors to this field, as it continues to expand and influence important institutional decisions, resource allocations, and curricular design (Rehrey et.al., 2019). In fact, as this field eventually becomes the new normal for conducting institutional operations and understanding our students, SOTL practitioners can play an instrumental role in how it will be used for the scholarly analysis and assessment of teaching, learning and student success (Rehrey et.al., 2018) (Potter, Rehrey, & Shepard 2022).
Mission and Goals
The purpose of the ISSOTL LASSIG will be to both support and provide a leadership role in the use of learning analytics for the advancement of research about teaching, learning and student success. Members of the SLA SIG will:
• Explore how LA can play a robust and informative role in supporting all aspect of the SOTL
• Provide resources to the broader ISSOTL community on the use of LA for scholarly research and in alignment with SOTL principles of good practice (Felten, 2013).
• Develop best practices while addressing the ethical and moral concerns for using LA to improve student success (Folkestad et al., 2019)
• Foster methods for using LA to address the complex issues facing higher education (Bass, 2020) (Siemens, Dawson & Eshelman, 2019)
• Inspire and generate new research about LA and student success
• Collaborate on workshops and presentations for annual ISSOTL conferences
Chair: George Rehrey (grehrey@indiana.edu)