5 Literature Review

A literature review was conducted to discover and summarize existing literature surrounding user perceptions of learning analytics (LA). While there is plenty of research surrounding the general topic of LA, few studies have targeted the perceptions of educators, learners, and other stakeholders. This literature review serves as an overview of existing literature on the topic, in order to inform next steps for best practices for higher educations implementing LA to inform teaching and learning.

Primo (encompassing ERIC, CBCA, PsycINFO, etc.), ACM Digital Library, Google Scholar, and SoLAR databases were searched for key search terms “learning analytics” and some combination of “student”, “user”, “faculty”, “perce*” (perception, perceive), and “attitude*” (attitudes). Titles and abstracts were reviewed for relevance prior to extraction. Research articles, conference proceedings, and policy reports were included if they directly reported user feedback of LA tools, identified factors contributing to LA implementation, or otherwise investigated user perceptions of LA, and were published in English between 2007 and 2017. Further, titles of relevant sources cited within the resultant sample of literature were searched using Primo or Google to obtain full-text documents. The final sample of documents (N=18) was divided into subcategories of general user (n=6), educator (n=4), and student (n=8) perceptions, as seen through the subsequent section headings.

This literature review begins with studies that investigated general user perceptions of learning analytics (LA), followed by educator perceptions of LA, and finally, student perceptions of LA.