Can we align learning analytics and student wellbeing?

Ms Samantha Ahern, Digital Education Project Officer, UCL
I am currently under taking a research project to address the question: ‘What synergies or conflicts exist between current HEI Learning Analytics and student wellbeing polices?’.  I aim to identify what synergies or conflicts exist between current learning analytics and student wellbeing policies, potentially produce some recommendations on how these services could be better aligned.

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My hope is that if we can provide meaningful, timely data to student support services we can create compassionate institutions that are pro-active in student support. Potentially reducing wellbeing issues amongst the student and staff population.
 
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are being invited to take part as the policies relevant to this work may not be publicly available. In addition, for some HEIs with a learning analytics implementation more detailed information will be sought with regard to the data used within the learning analytics and student wellbeing systems and the associated data flows.
 
Preliminary analysis of the policies will be undertaken to group student support models and learning analytics implementations. A sub-set of institutions will then be selected for further analysis.
 
The HEIs selected for further analysis will be requested to provide information about the data used within the learning analytics and student wellbeing systems and the associated data flows. This will used to create a systems model that will inform the identification of synergies and conflicts. 
 
This will help to establish whether at present learning analytics and student wellbeing can be aligned, and if amendments are required to aid alignment as recommended in the UUK #StepChange report.   
 
The call for participation is live and can be viewed on the UCL Digital Education team blog ( https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/2018/11/19/call-for-participants/
).
 
As the project progresses findings will be shared via the project blog: https://reflect.ucl.ac.uk/aligninglaandwellbeing/