Consulting the Data: Learning Analytics Pathways for Schools

Schools and approaches to education have seen dramatic shifts with the rise of technology. Traditionally, the classroom and learning structure was made up of a chalkboard, stationary front-facing desks, and a teacher instructing from the front of the room. Classrooms followed this structure for generations until the rise of the technological age began to shake up the way we do things in business and our daily lives. To quote Hanan Sharif and Amara Atif in their article published earlier this year, “The rise of the digital age has precipitated a transformative process that has generated many opportunities… During this ongoing development, a novel and rapidly growing discipline has surfaced that possesses the capacity to fundamentally transform the entirety of the educational landscape: learning analytics”.

What are Learning Analytics?

“The true genius of learning analytics lies not just in its ability to accumulate (student) data but also in its potential to interpret it, thereby translating raw information into actionable insights” (Sharif, 2024)

To understand what learning analytics is, The Society for Research in Learning Analytics (SoLAR) defines learning analytics as "the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs". Let’s elaborate on this and what it means for educators and learning leaders with a quote from The University of Queensland, “Learning analytics can assist students and staff by providing information that enhances learning and teaching by supporting adaptation in the practices, processes and systems…, such as improvements in assessment.

The rise of learning analytics began with a strong adoption by universities, with most research focused on issues specific to tertiary education, but as educational technologies in primary and secondary education become more widespread, and with the emergence of new classroom-focused technologies, a SoLAR article states: “there has been a growing awareness of the potentials of learning analytics for supporting students and diagnosing their learning progress in pre-university contexts”.

Australian schools fall somewhere within a spectrum of adoption and implementation of learning analytics processes, with those who have begun the adoption with tools ranging from manual methods like spreadsheets, native Learning Management System (LMS) analytics tools, to implementing powerful dedicated learning analytics software.

What Data is Needed for Learning Analytics?

Before we dive into the different tools, you may be asking: what kind of data is relevant to learning analytics? For basic analytics of student performance, you will need consolidation of:

• academic and assessment results

• attendance

• pastoral care data

• external results

with access to:

• data visualisation

The ideal learning analytics platform should allow you to view these parameters against each other based on the investigation you are conducting or the student story you are trying to tell. These parameters are a must for student data analytics, but they don’t always tell the full story of a cohort or an individual student. To expand the story of how students are tracking, you should also consider the addition of these data sets:

• external results

• behavioural incidents

• wellbeing data

• extra curricular activities information

and functions to:

• identify at risk students

• generate reports

• facilitate learning pathway goal setting for students

• as a bonus: academic awards facilitation and generation

Native Analytics Solutions within LMS, SIS and SMS

If you’re one of many Australian schools with a dedicated internal solution such as a Student Information System (SIS), Learning Management Systems (LMS), or School Management System (SMS), like TASS, then you likely already have a native learning analytics tool to take advantage of. While they don’t have the full functionality of stand-alone learning analytics software, they are great to use for basic analysis and dipping your toes into the wide world of data analytics.

At TASS, we have our own Student Profile Analytics tool within the Staff Portal to allow educators and staff to gain better insights into their students’ performance in a helpful dashboard with multiple views. The home page of the dashboard displays how the student is performing in multiple areas, viewed by subjects in the current semester, as well as a summary of their academic achievements over the last two reporting periods, and icons against subjects give a handy visual indicator of how they are tracking.

A Lessons Missed section calculates absences based on classes which is calculated against their timetable against days, or periods absent from school or class, where it is also possible to drill down further on these with additional data such as the reasons for absences. Staff can build the story further by viewing the pastoral care data for that student, which will display any pastoral care entries for the student in each subject, whether they are positive, neutral or negative in nature.

Helpful data visualisations allow educators to compare a student to the other students in their classes by measure of result. It is also possible to view this from previous reporting periods and view their results compared to the entire year level. Another graph displays a student’s performance over multiple reporting periods across all of their classes, with the ability to view individual classes or select classes, and also view additional statistics within this graph, such as maximum and minimum results for the class or cohort. A Lessons Missed graph shows lessons missed for acceptable and unacceptable reasons, which can be viewed by week or subject.

The detailed analytics available in the Staff Portal allows staff to quickly view important updates on student progress with the ability to draw insights from absences and pastoral care information, with useful data visualisations to help educators understand the student’s performance against their past results and that of their class and entire year level.

TASS understands the growing importance of analytics, which is why we introduced TrackOne Studio to the TASS family of products in 2021.

Dedicated Learning Analytics Software Integration

Dedicated learning analytics software solutions are the most powerful tool available to schools that really want to leverage student data analysis to develop and improve their teaching practices and give their students the best opportunities with data-informed decision-making. Unlike the previous options of spreadsheets and LMS/SIS/SMS native analytics, these platforms, like TrackOne Studio, consolidate all the data views most important to educators in a customisable dashboard, complete with data visualisations and easy access to detailed student and cohort views. Schools can also be rest assured that their data is safe within a platform like TrackOne Studio, as it accesses and stores data directly within the integrated internal system used by the school.

Though an agnostic product, The Learning Analytics Suite by TrackOne Studio provides schools with a comprehensive educational data analysis solution, which combines data from internal sources, and external sources (such as standardised and diagnostic tests) in real-time, to facilitate the analysis of student, subject, and cohort data. Unlike spreadsheets, which require prior knowledge of operational formulas and data analytics, The Learning Analytics Suite is designed to be adopted by the whole school. TrackOne Studio’s goal is to transform school data into insights that educators at every level can use to gain insights into student, subject, and school performance.

The easy-to-use platform allows educators and learning leaders to access a vast range of data views, allowing comparisons of academic results with external results, or attendance, well-being, soft skills, pastoral care, behavioural incidents, or extra curricular activities; the combinations are endless, so that schools have all the information they need to make data-informed decisions for the greatest effect.

The Learning Analytics Suite can be customised to suit the specific needs of your school and students. Schools can set up at-risk identifiers specific to their ethos and pedagogical styles so at-risk students are accurately identified early, allowing educators and school leaders appropriate time to intervene.

A wellbeing tool within the suite takes pastoral care to the next level, utilising data from pastoral care and student wellbeing surveys to provide a colour-graded view of the student’s wellbeing at the current time, and how they have been tracking historically.

The Learning Analytics Suite is designed to help staff make informed decisions for their student’s learning through their data, while the goal setting and academic mentoring functionalities help them to put theory into practice, by using data to support student growth. Portals available to students and parents allow students and their families to get involved with their own data-informed learning journey.

A solution like TrackOne Studio also allows schools to simplify their awards process, eliminating an often-dreaded task of manual calculation and replacing it with easy-to-set-up parameters and smart calculations to do all the heavy lifting for schools come awards time.

If your school is ready to take full advantage of learning analytics to leverage data-informed insights for pedagogy and student success, then we highly recommend getting in contact with the team at TrackOne Studio for a deep-dive demo into what sophisticated learning analytics can look like at your school.