Learning analytics (LA) involves the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, aiming to understand and optimize both the learning process and the environments in which it occurs. Among many themes that the LA community considers, natural language processing (NLP) algorithms have been widely…

Protection of student privacy is critical for scaling up the use of learning analytics (LA) in education. Poorly implemented frameworks for privacy protection may negatively impact LA outcomes and undermine trust in the discipline. To design and implement models and tools for privacy protection, we need to understand privacy itself. To develop…

Classroom sensing systems can capture data on teacher-student behaviours and interactions at a scale far greater than human observers can. These data, translated to multi-modal analytics, can provide meaningful insights to educational stakeholders. However, complex data can be difficult to make sense of. In addition, analyses done on these data…

The generation, use, and analysis of educational data comes with many promises and opportunities, especially where digital materials allow usage of learning analytics (LA) as a tool in data-based decision-making (DBDM). However, there are questions about the interplay between teachers, students, context, and technology. Therefore, this paper…

Keynotes fulfill a particular function in the planning and compiling of a conference program, and these individuals are invited for a number of reasons -- to lend political and/or scholarly gravitas to the event, to stimulate and enlighten, and/or to provoke. Keynotes are also often outsiders to a particular field, and an invitation to deliver a…

This response to Neil Selwyn's paper, 'What's the problem with learning analytics?', relates his work to the ethical challenges associated with learning analytics and proposes six ethical challenges for the field.

The possibilities of Learning Analytics as a tool for empowering teachers and educators have created a steep interest in how to provide so-called actionable insights. However, the literature offers little in the way of defining or discussing what the term "actionable insight" means. This selective literature review provides a look into…

This paper describes a partnership-based approach for analyzing data from a learning management system (LMS) used by students in grades 6-12. The goal of the partnership was to create indicators for the ways in which students navigated digital learning activities, referred to as playlists, that were comprised of resources, pre-assessments, and…

Open Learning Analytics (OLA) is an emerging concept in the field of Learning Analytics (LA). It deals with learning data collected from multiple environments and contexts, analyzed with a wide range of analytics methods to address the requirements of different stakeholders. Due to this diversity in different dimensions of OLA, the LA developers…

In "Funes the Memorius," Jorge Luis Borges tells the tale of an Argentinian man who falls off a horse, becomes paralyzed, and acquires the strange gift of infinite memory (Borges, 1993). Funes remembers everything, which is to say he forgets nothing. The author will use Borges's story as the backdrop for his response to Professor…

In classrooms, some transitions between activities impose (quasi-)synchronicity, meaning there is a need for learners to move between activities at the same time. To make real-time decisions about when to move to the next activity, teachers need to be able to balance the progress of their students as they work at different paces. In this paper, we…

This editorial introduces a special section of the "Journal of Learning Analytics," for which Neil Selwyn's keynote address to LAK '18 has been written up as an article, "What's the problem with learning analytics?" His claims and arguments are engaged in commentaries from Alfred Essa, Rebecca Ferguson, Paul Prinsloo, and…

In this short thought-piece, I attempt to capture the type of freewheeling discussions I had with our late colleague, Mika Seppälä, a research mathematician from Helsinki. Mika, not being a psychometrician or learning scientist, was blissfully free from the design constraints that experts sometimes ingest, unwittingly. I also draw on delightful…

Collaboration is a complex, multidimensional process; however, details of how multimodal features intersect and mediate group interactions have not been fully unpacked. Characterizing and analyzing the temporal patterns based on multimodal features is a challenging yet important work to advance our understanding of computer-supported collaborative…

The importance of temporality in learning has been long established, but it is only recently that serious attention has begun to be paid to the precise identification, measurement, and analysis of the temporal features of learning. From 2009 to 2016, a series of temporality workshops explored temporal concepts and data types, analysis methods for…