Enriching (learning) community platforms with learning analytics components

Abstract

In this paper we present a generic and extensible analytics workbench and show how it can be integrated with learning environments in order to analyze the learners' activities. As the analytics workbench already supports a wide range of analysis types including network analysis, statistical analysis, and analysis of activity logs, the main effort needed for embedding learning analytics features into a learning platform lies in data exchange for input and output of analysis processes between the learning platform and the workbench. However the analytics workbench is also designed for extensibility so that more specific analysis capabilities can be added to it easily if desired. We report three case studies of such integrations and show the benefits for different target groups. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.