Education-STELA - Successful Transition from secondary to higher education using Learning Analytics

The main goal of the project is to enhance a successful transition from secondary to higher education by means of learning analytics. To this end the project will develop, test, and assess a learning analytics approach that focuses on providing formative and summative feedback to students in the transition. On top of the development of a student dashboard, the project will develop dashboards for the student counsellors and teachers, hereby disclosing a vast amount of information that can be used to improve counselling and teaching practices. To realize this ambitious goal the project gathers a multidisciplinary team of learning analytics researchers, educational technology experts, experts in the transition from secondary to higher education, and practitioners. Thanks to this multidisciplinary team, the project will tackle all the different steps required for the application of learning analytics: data collection, data analysis, data visualization, dashboard design, dashboard development, and last but not least the actual implementation and thorough evaluation of the learning analytics approach. By applying the developed learning analytics approach to diverse educational contexts in a variety of case studies (different countries, different admission policies, different faculties), the clear potential for mainstreaming and for extension to other fields than the transition is shown. Since the developed software and tools will be distributed under an open-source license, this potential is even further increased. Finally, the project will provide an in-depth review of the different steps needed to use learning analytics in the transition from secondary to higher education. This review is translated to concrete policy recommendations concerning the use of learning analytics to raise the quality in education.