Announcing a new technical report, The State of Learning Analytics in 2012: A Review and Future Challenges.

‘The State of Learning Analytics’ reviews the emergence of the field over the past decade, tracing its roots in other disciplines and setting out current trends and future lines of work. In the process, it identifies the focus of and drivers behind related types of analytic – particularly academic analytics and action analytics.

The development of the field is set out in a broadly chronological structure, which demonstrates the increasingly rapid pattern of development as new drivers emerge, new fields are appropriated and new tools developed. Tracing the development of learning analytics over time highlights a gradual shift away from a technological focus towards an educational focus, and the introduction of tools, initiatives and methods that are significant in the field today.

The report draws on two main sources. The first is the list of resources provided by the online course associated with the LAK 2012 conference. The second is the literature cited in over 70 submissions to that conference. The 20 most-cited works and the 20 most‐cited authors are all included in the report.

Reference:
Ferguson, R. (2012). The State Of Learning Analytics in 2012: A Review and Future Challenges. Technical Report KMI-12-01, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK. http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/techreport/kmi-12-01