The Virtuous Circle of Learning Design and Learning Analytics to Develop Student-Centered Online Education

Abstract

Over the last decade, blended and online education have become mainstream approaches to deliver learning opportunities to a range of learners. In particular, with the affordances of different pedagogical models in blended and online provision there has been a heightened expectation of more student-centred Learning Designs (Sharples 2019). Allowing students to work online together in a digital space has never been so easy. At the same time, providers of blended and online learning as well as the learners themselves feature more diverse characteristics. Whether or not teachers actually design online education opportunities for these diverse sets of learners has received some conceptual attention, but relatively few studies have empirically tested whether teachers actually design inclusive learning environments. In this chapter, we will explore the lived experiences of teachers who have aimed to introduce student-centred approaches in their online environment at one of the largest providers of online education, the Open University UK, and how we can distil success criteria from effective student-centred approaches that work online.