Dear Colleagues,

Data-driven technologies are the core infrastructure around which the modern global economy operates. The educational arena is not an exception and the interest of companies in gathering and exploiting educational data to obtain profit has dramatically increased.

From a more global—not narrowly focused on economic issues—and humanist perspective, the United Nations call for 17 goals to transform our world. One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is “Quality Education” which is directly linked to other goals related to social justice: “Gender Equality” (SDG 5), “Decent work and economic growth” (SDG 8), “Reduced inequalities” (SDG 10) or “Sustainable cities and communities” (SDG 11). Such bold goals ask for profound social shifts, which are not possible without embracing "the collective social processes that influence rights, status, and resources across society”, a.k.a. “Politics” (Green 2020).

Learning Analytics has been defined as “measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs” (SoLAR 2021, Lang et al 2017).

This Special Issue aims to explore how Learning Analytics can contribute to achieving a more sustainable education from a deliberative and rigorous grounding in the politics of social justice. Instead of considering technology as a neutral tool or focusing on deploying techy artifacts as an end in itself, the aim of this Issue is to prioritize the aforementioned SDGs and align Learning Analytics to that end. The use of learning data for research purposes should explicitly address social justice as a goal. Education is a social process, not a product; a human right, not a privilege; a human-centered activity, not an algorithm-centered procedure. Can Learning Analytics help us deal with uncertainties and new challenges without over-determining whatever an algorithm produces?

Hopefully, this Special Issue can contribute to improving the language and methods needed to fully recognize and evaluate the impact of Learning Analytics on a Quality Education.

References:

Green, B. (2020). Data Science as Political Action: grounding Data Science in a Politics of Justice. Available at SSRN 3658431. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.2139/ssrn.3658431

Lang, C., Siemens, G., Wise, A., & Gasevic, D. (Eds.). (2017). Handbook of learning analytics. SOLAR, Society for Learning Analytics and Research. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.18608/hla17

Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) (2021). What is Learning Analytics? Available online: https://www.solaresearch.org/about/what-is-learning-analytics (accessed on 3 January 2021).

Dr. Javier Portillo Berasaluce
Guest Editor

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• Learning Analytics
• Multimodal Learning Analytics
• Content analytics
• Data-Driven Student Feedback
• Analytic Dashboards
• Recommender Systems
• Quality Education
• Education Policies
• Education Systems
• Education Regulation
• Digital Learning Platforms
• Gender Equality
• Social Equality
• Private and Public Cooperation
• Cybersecurity
• Evidence-Based Decision Making
• Data Governance
• Student privacy