Learning analytics in 21st century education: A review

Abstract

Learning Analytics is a topic of growing interest among educational research community. As a result of a systematic literature review, this article describes the usefulness of Learning Analytics as a key element to support a proper 21st century education and to intervene its current crisis from the perspective of different educational stakeholders such as teachers, students, principals and family. From a 1384 document corpus, 100 of them were processed through an abstracting and in-depth reading and a further categorizing stage. Results showed that Learning Analytics provides important inputs for a well-informed decision making of educational stakeholders. Also, despite its importance and educational potential, current implementation of Learning Analytics should no longer be restricted to highly technical profiles but to be open to the academic community and the population in general. In that sense, it is proposed that the skills and knowledge related to Learning Analytics must be included in an updated version of "21st century information literacy".