3 Environmental Scan of Ontario Higher Education Institutions

To  identify higher education institutions that had made learning analytics a strategic priority in Ontario, Canada,  we conducted a brief environmental scan through an Internet search to examine publicly available documents and websites of Ontario universities and colleges for mentions of learning analytics.

Specifically, we began by examining the strategic mandate agreements (SMA) of 45 publicly funded colleges and universities in Ontario (https://www.ontario.ca/page/college-and-university-strategic-mandate-agreements#section-2). The SMAs outline the strengths of each college and university and how the province of Ontario can work with each institution. All of the SMAs were available in English. Thus, the following English terms were used: Learning An, Analy, Online, Tech, and Data.

From the findings in the SMAs, we searched specific institution websites to search for “learning analytics” and followed links to investigate leads. We also collected data via email communication with universities that we knew had existing policies for data use.

The data were collected from 24 colleges and 21 universities in Ontario. The SMAs 2014-2017 were available for both colleges and universities; the SMAs 2018-2021 were only available for the universities. Our scan revealed, perhaps not surprisingly, that none of SMAs 2014-2017 from Ontario universities and colleges contained mention of learning analytics. We expect that there are individual faculty members and project teams that are actively working with learning analytics projects at many of these institutions, but learning analytics is still in the early stages of adoption at the institutional level.

In the current SMAs 2018-2021, however, a small number of institutions are beginning to include mentions of learning analytics:

Lakehead University has a sub-committee that evaluates existing data and patterns related to student retention and helping to steer future strategies for student success, engagement, and retention (p.6).

University of Guelph was the first Canadian university to join Quality Matters, which evaluates online learning and uses learning analytics, such as an Early Warning System in Desire2Learn that identifies students at risk (p.10).

University of Ottawa has analytics that “enable tracking of outcomes and deliver insights into the performance levels of departments, courses, or individuals” (p. 12).

University of Windsor uses learning analytics packages from Blackboard and is working on improved access to data for teaching improvement (pl. 12).

Promisingly, many institutions identified blended learning, hybrid learning, online learning, open learning, technology-assisted learning, technology-enhanced learning, and technology-enabled learning as strategic priorities. We expect that research-intensive institutions and those that prioritize online and technology-enabled learning delivery would have more organizational capacity for adopting learning analytics.