Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs. The Learning Analytics Community Exchange originated as an FP7-funded European project. Its objectives are to promote the creation and exchange of knowledge, to build the knowledge base, to help guide the development of the field and to build consensus on interoperability and data sharing.
Overview
LACE – now the Learning Analytics Community Europe – organises activities that integrate communities with an interest in learning analytics or in the related field of educational data mining. It brings together people working in K-12 schools, higher education, workplace learning and informal learning. It also makes links between practitioners, researchers, developers and policymakers.
These links are used to stimulate creativity and to speed up the identification of effective solutions to real problems, driving current research, technology transfer and policy development.
LACE has developed a knowledge base of evidence, the LACE Evidence Hub. The Hub focuses on four statements – that learning analytics support teaching, that they support learning, that they are applied ethically and that they are taken up at scale. The Hub brings together positive, negative and neutral evidence about these statements and presents it in searchable form.
LACE has also investigated possible futures for learning analytics, and has used this work to inform research and policy agendas.
