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Analysing analytics isn’t an easy task, but it is useful and enlightening nonetheless and I’m glad that I have been (not quite) nudged to do it!

As this lifestream draws to an end and because we have been looking at learning analytics, I have been examining my own learning over the course of the last ten weeks and realised a number of things that wouldn’t have been made visible by quantitative metrics. One of these is that in my indecision over the pros and cons of LA I have sought to discover my tutors’ stance and found it difficult to determine. Why have I done this and not made up my own mind? The obvious answer is that I am the student and they the teachers from whom I am learning. There is also a wish for certainty, for the knowledge that I have got the answer ‘right’. This isn’t the heart of education which must be concerned with the development of my own critical abilities, together with an acknowledgement that most often there isn’t a right answer, certainly not easily deliverable on a dashboard. So although my instinctive wariness hasn’t left me, due mainly to concerns over power and privacy, I will try to keep an open mind in the hope that in full and equal partnership with the student, ie for the learner, Learning Analytics might foreground patterns of engagement allowing difficulties to be overcome and goals reached. More importantly, rejection is a missed opportunity to voice critical concern.