This document summarizes a presentation on promoting student engagement and agency through learning analytics. It discusses challenges in using analytics to monitor student performance, as well as opportunities to empower students by giving them access to and ability to reflect on their own learning data. The presentation argues that learning analytics should aim to support student ownership over their learning experience, disrupt traditional educational hierarchies, and position students as active agents rather than passive consumers of their education.

1. Dr Neil McPherson - @neilgmcpherson
Marjorie McCrory - @marjoriemccrory
Dr Gordon Heggie - @gorheg
School of Media, Culture & Society
University of the West of Scotland
Promoting inclusive & engaged
student learning with analytics:
engagement via agency
9th Annual University of Glasgow Learning and Teaching Conference - 12 April 2016
'Active student participation in learning, teaching and assessment'

2. Promoting inclusive & engaged student learning with analytics
Institutional change: refocusing education at UWS
Reshaping the learning environment: a learning in partnership model and
methodology
Engagement via agency
Learning analytics and student engagement: challenges and opportunities
Overview

3. "We shall celebrate staff and students as co-creators of learning, co-solvers of
learning challenges and cobeneficiaries of the positive outcomes that ensue.
Our learning environments – formal and informal – will reflect these values and
support them”
"We will do this by demonstrably recognising
improvements and successes among our staff and
students, by prioritising engagement with
information about our performance and ourselves”
"We will ensure that all involved with UWS benefit
from the encouragement of values, attitudes and
behaviours that support the need for positive
encounters in the learning environment.
Institutional change: refocusing Education at UWS

4. “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners
and their contexts for the purposes of understanding and optimizing
learning, and the environments in which it occurs”
(Siemens & Long 2011)
Employing learning analytics to
– Analyse engagement and performance
– Inform strategic priorities
– Facilitate short, medium and long-term interventions to provide support,
advice and guidance
– Improve progression and retention
Predictive modelling and the 'intelligent curriculum'
(See Long & Siemens, 2011. For overview of 'current state of play' in UK, see Sclater, 2014)
Considering learning analytics

5. The concept of ‘listening to the student voice’ – implicitly if not deliberately –
supports the perspective of student as ‘consumer’, whereas ‘students as change
agents’ explicitly supports a view of the student as ‘active collaborator’ and ‘co-
producer’, with the potential for transformation.”
(Dunne and Zandstra, 2011: 4)
Learning analytics, student engagement & agency?

6. Reshaping the learning environment : A learning in
partnership model and methodology
Listening to the student voice or promoting student agency?
(see eg, Dunne & Zandstra, 2011)
Supporting student engagement or supporting engaging students?
(see eg, Bryson, 2014)
Student as consumer or student as producer?
(see eg, Neary and Winn, 2009)
Transmission or discovery?
(see eg, Barr & Tagg, 1995)
HEA Students as Partners in the Curriculum Change Programme (here)
• Partners in learning, partners in research
• Collaboration & co-production
• Co-creating the learning experience
• Learning in discovery mode
Jisc Case Study:
Xertifying the learning experience

7. connection
creation
production
engagement
inclusion
participation
active,
inquiry-based
learning
research
mindedness
Learning in
partnership
from object to subject from passive recipient to active agent
from instruction to discovery
Learning in partnership:
agents of change, changing as agents

8. Learning analytics: engagement via agency
Learning
data
&
reflexivity
Encourage
Empower
Enable
Engage

9. Using learning data to
• Encourage learners as active and reflexive citizens
• Engage learners as ‘agents’ in the shaping and regulation of their learning
experience
• Enable learners to make legitimate judgments and claims relating to their
learning and become comfortable in negotiating and addressing challenges
• Empower learners to change the learning landscape around them, to engage
in higher level dialogue with educators and managers, at all levels, around
the development of learning and the curriculum.
Learning analytics: engagement via agency

10. Introducing an engagement & performance dashboard
Performance data profile
Assessment marks mapped against
• marks of module cohort
• mean / range / frequency
By assessment component / campus / year

11. Surveillance
Analysing what?
Challenges
And that's not the impression I got of what they're trying to
implement whatsoever. It's kind of Orwellian, we're always watching
you system, and I'm not a fan of that at all.
So see if I'm already failing, just screaming at me that I'm failing doesn't
do it. It doesn't advise me what to do next; it just tells me what's
happening. If I'm caught in a thunderstorm then it's just to tell me it's
raining.

12. Problematising performance
What does it matter?
Challenges
There was, like, concern perhaps that showing, like, different
people's grades progressions and stuff, if you were a student who
wasn't performing as well then it might sort of make them feel like
they're less, or it might just sort of bring them down in terms of
their confidence.
It's just going to ostracise people, it's just going to make people… like, I
know people that think oh amazing, or just… People don't care…

13. How do we address these challenges?
What are our challenges ?

14. Learning analytics: towards ownership and agency
It’s about addressing the ‘dysfunctional’ relationship between
teaching and research
It’s about disrupting ‘traditional’ educational hierarchies
It’s about resisting consumerist models of higher education
It’s about displacing the ‘pedagogies of mistrust’
It’s about learning in partnership
Using data to support access, awareness, understanding, dialogue and
reflexivity around the learner experience

15. It just hit me though how positive it could be, myself. I didn’t
realise…it was just my understanding. I kept thinking how
negative people could think of being kind of monitored in this
way, but it actually is so much positive.

16. References
Barr, R.B. and Tagg, J (1995) From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm For Undergraduate Education.Change: The Magazine of Higher
Learning, vol 27 no 6, pp 13-25
Bryson, C (2014) Understanding and developing student engagement. London: Routledge
Dunne, E. & Roos, Z (2011) Students as change agents: New ways of engaging with learning and teaching in Higher Education. Bristol:
ESCalate.
Gunn, C. (2014) 'Defining an agenda for learning analytics'. In Hegarty, B., McDonald, J. & Loke , S.K. (eds) Rhetoric and Reality: Critical
perspectives on educational technology. Proceedings Eascilite, Dunedin, 2014: 683-687.
Healey, M., Flint, A and Harrington, K (2014) Engagement through partnership: students as partners in learning and teaching in higher
education. York: Higher Education Academy
McPherson, N., Heggie, G., Faina, K., Kean., M. & McCarroll, J. (2015) Partners in Learning/Partners in Research: Developing a Culture of
Research Mindedness in Social Science Students. Case study. Online: HEA.
McPherson, N., and G. Heggie (2015) ‘Transitioning to Students as Partners, Producers, Collaborators and Co-creators. Are We Serious?’
Published conference proceedings. QAA International Enhancement and Innovation in Higher Education Conference, Glasgow.
Neary, M and Winn, J (2009) The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education., in Bell, L., Stevenson, H. &
Neary, N. (2009) The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience. pp 192–210 London: Continuum.
Sclater, N (2014) Learning analytics The current state of play in UK higher and further education. Online. Jisc.
Taylor, P. and D. Wilding (2009). Rethinking the values of higher education - the student as collaborator and producer?. Gloucester: QAA.
Siemens, G. & Long, P. (2011) Penetrating the Fog: Analytics in Learning and Education. EDUCAUSE Review, v46 n5 p30-32.