LEARNING ANALYTICS TO INFORM AND GUIDE TEACHERS AS DESIGNERS OF EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTIONS

As part of its activities to promote educational innovation among local schools, Tallinn University Center for Innovation in Education organizes learning scenarios for students at different levels of primary and/secondary education. The focus of these interdisciplinary learning scenarios is on multimodal learning (Kress 2011) to develop multiliteracy, i.e. digital literacy and collaborative learning. The paper gives an insight how does learning analytics support the design of such pedagogical intervention in the manner of design-based research (Wang and Hannafin 2005) where researchers and teacher- trainers co-create educational interventions in an authentic educational setting. The aim of the research was to analyze, how the integration of learning analytics in the piloting phase of pedagogical intervention supports the improvement of content and pedagogical design and gives feedback about student engagement and collaborative learning. We used mixed methods approach (Creswell 2013) combining both qualitative and quantitative data gathering and analysis methods. This combination of data sources included observations on engagement and collaborative problem solving, outcome analysis and students feedback questionnaires that were filled after each task and in the follow-up session.

In the combination of content analysis, learning analytics provide an informative view how learning takes place. The simple outcome-based analysis may set important details aside or do not fully explain what happened during the learning process. Learning analytics provide a thorough overview of students collaborative learning profiles, engagement profiles, that could be analyzed both individually and group wise. The analysis makes the learning process more visible and gives objective directions how to improve the design and learning effectiveness of complex learning scenario. Thus integrating learning analytics into the teaching process gives valuable feedback about the learning process and is an especially useful tool for developing a complex learning design such as integrated learning scenarios where different levels of engagement and forms of collaboration take place.