News

"Learner flourishing" is a wholistic concept that reflects current concerns that education must cultivate the whole person for the turbulent times ahead. A special issue dedicated to how this intersects with AI has just come out... There is growing emphasis on flourishing as a fundamental concept for our times, possibly more helpful than "sustainability" as argued by John Ehrenfeld: "flourishing — the attainment of the full potential of living creatures." When it comes to learners, Frank Ma...
Read More

Learning analytics offers promising solutions for personalising student learning and support, yet adoption remains limited due to implementation challenges and unclear impact. The missing piece? Learning design, which provides the context needed to transform data into meaningful insights into students’ learning. CIC's Lecturer Dr Lisa-Angelique Lim addresses this gap in teaching her subject Crunch: Learning Analytics for Performance and Improvement, part of the Graduate Certificate of Learning ...
Read More

Yuveena Gopalan's doctoral research is studying how successful researchers learnt their craft. The first major publication from her PhD has just come out, distilling the insights from interviews into a conceptual framework. Strange as it may seem, relatively little is known about how academic researchers learn. Yes there are training courses to build specific skills, but all the evidence from workplace learning studies shows that this is not how professionals in other sectors learn. Co-supervis...
Read More

The Learning Analytics field is now a teenager, having launched in 2011. With the explosive rise of GenAI, this seemed a good moment for the community to reflect on where we need to go. CIC's Kirsty Kitto co-chaired a whole day workshop to wrangle this... Assoc. Prof. Kirsty Kitto co-led a stimulating international workshop entitled, What are the Grand Challenges of Learning Analytics? as part of the International Conference on Learning Analytics. The mission: In line with the conference t...
Read More

Our research stream into Belonging Analytics has been putting a new platform through its paces in a pilot study... We're delighted to share a new development in our Belonging Analytics research program, after piloting the SenseMaker® platform. We design a SenseMaker framework grounded in theories of belonging, to identify key dimensions, indicators, and factors of belonging. Story prompts invite students to share a story or an experience that made them feel that they belong or do not be...
Read More

Could we develop trustworthy "Belonging Analytics" from AI analysis of students' reflective writing? There's growing interest in the use of large language models (LLMs) like GPT, Gemini and Claude to assist with qualitative data analysis. In this work, we develop and evaluate a methodology to prompt GPT to perform theory-based deductive coding of student reflective writing. CIC PhD candidate Sriram Ramanathan is focused on what learning analytics can tell us about university students' se...
Read More

Learning Analytics is full of situations where features essential to understanding the learning process cannot be measured. In this work, doctoral candidate Ben Hicks and Kirsty Kitto propose an approach... Hicks, B., & Kitto, K. (2025). Game Theoretic Models of Intangible Learning Data. Proceedings of the 15th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference, Dublin, IRE.  https://doi.org/10.1145/3706468.3706557 Learning Analytics is full of situations where features essential...
Read More

Doctoral Consortia can be transformational experiences for PhD candidates. But what makes them work well, and how do you evaluate their impact? CIC's team have been involved for over a decade in both leading and participating in the Doctoral Consortium at the International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge. Here's our analysis of how it functions as induction into the community of practice — joint work by CIC's Simon Buckingham Shum and Yuveena Gopalan, working with Rebecca Fer...
Read More