From Analysis to Improvement: Challenges and Opportunities for Learning Analytics

Learning analytics (LA) is a multidisciplinary area of research, where education, statistics, and technology experts collaborate with other disciplines to get insights from learning data sets. This involves a continuous cycle of gathering data from teachers’ and students’ interactions, filtering and translating it to proper formats, using a wide range of analysis techniques and starting again after taking advantage from the results found. Considering the variety of expertise involved, the need for sharing knowledge and experiences is highlighted in relevant forums such as the Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference. The same happens at Spanish level with the Learning Analytics Summer Institute, Spain and the Spanish Network of Learning Analytics. Research works presented in this special issue show the ability of analyzing and improving learning and teaching processes through LA. These three papers address different educational challenges, such as assessing massive collaborative projects, evaluating the accessibility and usability of open educational resources and mapping them with the IMS Caliper standard, and using social network analysis to evaluate the socio-regulation skills among students.