Learning Analytics Tool for Bulgarian School Education

Abstract

Nowadays, schools use many information systems to automate their activities for different stakeholders’ groups – learning management systems, student diary, library systems, digital repositories, financial management and accounting systems, document processing systems, etc. The huge amount of data generated by the users of these systems, led to increased interest in the collection and analysis of data to encourage students to achieve higher results, teachers to provide personalized support and school managers to make data-driven decisions at all levels of school, and stimulates research into the application of Learning Analytics (LA) in schools. The paper presents a LA model and a software prototype of the LA tool designed for the needs of Bulgarian school education from the perspective of different stakeholder groups (students, teachers, class teachers, parents, school managers, inspectors from evaluation agencies), aiming to improve school methods of approaching and analyzing learning data. The tool allows stakeholders to track data for students’ learning or training for different purposes, e.g. monitoring, analysis, forecast, intervention, recommendations, etc., but finally to improve the quality of learning and teaching processes. Research and experiments with the model and the LA tool under consideration are conducted based on the information infrastructure of a typical Bulgarian school.