Abstract:

Requirements analysis is an essential part of system development. Traditionally, a plan-driven approach has been used in the requirements analysis. However, change-driven approaches have gained popularity singe agile development has become more popular in system development. While both approaches are well known, they require application based on the case at hand, and the results of their application vary in practice meaning that requirements analysis is a non-trivial task.

In the recent years, analytics has been in focus on education domain. The majority of the work has been on study and learning analytics where the actions and the results come from students. The data is collected in the learning environment and in the study managements system such as study registry. The data is analyzed to track the progress of the student. Based on this, for example, needs for intervention from the teacher for individual students can be identified. In addition to the study and the learning analytics, other areas of analytics such as environmental, biometric, and behavioral have been identified.

However, there are still additional related areas of analytics applicable in education. For example, while current analytics focus on the actions of the student, they focus less on the actions of the teacher and the related workflow. Also, an important viewpoint is the possibility of guidance using the information gained via analytics. Often, this is thought to be guidance from an academic advisor to a student, but it can be also guidance from teacher, or self-guidance of the student made possible by on-time accurate information gained from analytics.

In order to benefit from analytics, there is a need for education analytics system having the analytics data available and supporting the needs and requirements of the relevant stakeholders. Since these kinds of systems are currently not that common, many educational organizations are building or planning to build them. This should entail doing requirements analysis on the education analytics system in a feasible way.

In this paper, we present as a case study an ongoing project in Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences aimed at building education analytics system for relevant stakeholders in the organization. We have completed the initial requirements analysis in the project and, based on the results and knowledge gained, we present our approach to requirements analysis on education analytics system. We used a hybrid of plan-driven and change-driven approach, and we discuss the reasoning behind this decision. We describe the approach and both its plan-driven and change-driven components and, based on our work and observations on the case so far, we discuss the lessons learned.

Keywords:

Requirements analysis, education analytics, system development, case study, lessons learned.