In his recently published specification for education and wellbeing analytics, Professor Edward Peck, the UK Government’s higher education student support champion and Vice-Chancellor of Nottingham Trent University (NTU), highlighted the opportunity provided to universities by the increasingly sophisticated use of student analytics.
Solutionpath has been providing our student engagement analytics platform, StREAM, to UK clients for over 10 years, starting with our pathfinder university NTU in 2013. Since then, over 25 other universities have engaged with us to make better use of the data that exists within their multiple educational technology systems, to improve how they support student success and attainment.
Whether cloaked in language around retention or continuation, or – as we are seeing more – focusing on student success and wellbeing, it is clear there is much to learn from the data on how students are participating in their studies.
Consideration of the ‘use and effectiveness of learner analytics in tracking and monitoring progress and development’ was one of the criteria for assessment of the learning environment in the government’s specification for the first round of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). For the latest round of TEF submissions, this focus had changed to ‘relevant findings from learner analytics, for example about students’ active engagement with learning’.
