How Can Learning Analytics Enhance Online Teaching? A Teacher's Perspective

Abstract

This paper examines the perspectives of teachers on the use of Learning Analytics (LA) to enhance online teaching in higher education institutions during the post-Covid era. The increasing shift towards online teaching as a result of the pandemic has presented a number of challenges for teachers. As online teaching is likely to remain a part of the higher education landscape, it is important to understand teachers' views on the topic. This study explores how LA could support teachers in their online teaching. For this purpose, we conducted 18 interviews with instructors from German and Dutch universities about the changes that online teaching has led to, opportunities and threats of LA, the information teachers require about their students, and the ability of LA to enhance the advantages of online teaching and mitigate its disadvantages. Our results show that teachers' opinions of LA are generally positive and that they would use LA if it were available in form of an intuitive and interactive dashboard. LA also offers the possibility to alleviate many of the problems in online teaching identified by the instructors. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.