Investigating the Relationships Between Online Activity, Learning Strategies and Grades to Create Learning Analytics-Supported Learning Designs

Abstract

Learning analytics offers the opportunity to collect, analyse and visualise feedback on learning activities using authentic data in real-time. The REFLECTOR project was used to investigate whether there are correlations between students learning strategies, their online activity and their grades. Information about the learning strategies was obtained using the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire. The grades and the online activity of students for two pilot courses was collected from the log data of the learning management system. Analysis of the collected data showed that there are moderate correlations to be found, for instance between metacognitive self-regulation, documents that are related to planning and grades. The pilot sessions taught us that there are practical issues with regards to data storage location as well as data security that need to be taken into account when learning analytics is integrated into existing learning designs. Overall, the project results show that a close relationship between learning analytics and the learning design of courses is urgently needed to make learning analytics effective.