What is learning analytics?

Definition of learning analytics

Learning data is any information that arises during learning, such as grades, practice results, submitted work, and attendance. It can be analyzed for individual students, for classes, or for an entire school.

A grade sums up performance at one point in time. Learning analytics, by contrast, looks at trends and patterns across many such results.

How learning analytics works

Learning analytics follows a cycle.

Typical questions that learning analytics answers:

• How is a class doing across its subjects?
• Which topics do many students find difficult?
• Which mistakes keep coming up in practice?
• What should a student work on next?

Benefits for teachers, school leaders, and families

Teachers spot gaps while there is still time to respond, for example before a class test. In staff meetings and parent conversations, they can back up their assessment with results.

School leaders see which classes and subjects need support and can direct support programs there. Students see what they are currently working on, and parents learn where they can help their child.

Challenges and limits

Data protection

Learning data about children and young people deserves special protection. A school should only collect what it needs for teaching and support, and decide who may see which analysis. In OhayoSchool, roles and permissions control access, and practice data is stored in pseudonymized form on servers in Germany.

Interpretation

Data only shows what was recorded. A weak series of exercises may be down to a new topic or a bad day, which is why the teacher judges what it means for a student.

Effort

Learning analytics should not require entering data twice. Ideally, the data arises from work that happens anyway, such as entering grades or practicing.

Learning analytics in OhayoSchool

In OhayoSchool, learning data comes from the applications themselves, above all grades, the class register, and the learning terminal. The class statistics show a class's grade average for each subject, and OhayoSchool names the topics a class finds difficult.

OhayoSchool records recurring mistakes directly in the learning terminal, for individual students as well as for the whole class. In the learning profile, teachers see a student's strengths compared with the class average, and the learning profile assistant recommends the next topic.

With competency grids, teachers record learning progress by competency and set individual support goals for each child. Ohayo Radar shows analyses across several school years in a dedicated overview, and school authorities see them across all their schools.

Students see their own grades, and parents see their child's grades as soon as they are entered. If the school switches on the view, parents also find a summary of the learning profile with strengths, topics practiced, and progress, without raw scores.

Frequently asked questions