La analítica del aprendizaje en educación médica: ¿punto de inflexión?

Abstract

Learning analytics is an innovative discipline that has an enormous potential to improve the quality of medical education and learning assessment. It is defined as: “the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs”. In recent decades, the appearance of large volumes of data (big data), accompanied by a quick evolution of educational data mining techniques, the emergence of sophisticated technologies to analyze and visualize any type of data, as well as the availability of permanently- connected mobile electronic devices, higher processing speed and capacity of information retrieval, have generated a context that favors the use of learning analytics in clinical medicine and medical education. In this paper, the recent history of the concept of learning analytics is described, as well as its advantages and disadvantages in higher education, and its applications in the teaching of health sciences and educational assessment. It is necessary for the community of medical educators to be acquainted with learning analytics, in order to be able to integrate it to our context in an efficacious and timely manner.