Engaging stakeholders in the learning analytics design process
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2020
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Learning Analytics (LA) is a rapidly growing field that offers valuable insights into student learning processes, behaviours, and needs. Despite its potential, several challenges have emerged, including low educator satisfaction, steep learning curves, misalignment between analytics and pedagogy, and limited engagement with learning technologies. These issues often stem from the lack of stakeholder involvement in the design of LA tools. Teachers and learners, who are the primary users and beneficiaries, are frequently excluded from the design process.
This thesis advocates for a human-centred, co-design approach to LA development, where educators, learners, developers, and other stakeholders collaborate actively. Such an approach can democratise the design process, align analytics with pedagogical goals, and better meet user expectations. To explore this, the research addresses three key questions: how co-design techniques can support stakeholder integration, what roles co-design practitioners and researchers play, and what challenges arise when engaging stakeholders.
Using Design-Based Research, the study examines three university case studies: simulation-based healthcare education, a Data Science Masters program, and scalable personalised feedback for educators. These diverse contexts provide a foundation for testing and refining co-design techniques.
The thesis makes three main contributions. First, it identifies five critical challenges in LA co-design: power dynamics, surveillance concerns, dependencies on learning design, unequal expertise between teachers and learners, and varying levels of data literacy. Second, it demonstrates how established co-design techniques can be adapted for LA, offering empirical evidence and practical guidance. These findings are compiled into a publicly available Learning Analytics Co-Design Playbook to support broader adoption. Third, the thesis highlights the essential role of the co-design practitioner, detailing the skills and functions required to facilitate participatory design while also conducting research.
Overall, this work provides a framework for effectively engaging educational stakeholders in the co-design of LA innovations, contributing to more inclusive and pedagogically aligned learning technologies.
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