Are We Living In LA (P)LA Land? Reporting on the Practice of 30 STEM Tutors in their Use of a Learning Analytics Implementation at the Open University

Most higher education institutions view their increasing use of learning analytics as having significant potential to improve student academic achievement, retention outcomes, and learning and teaching practice but the realization of this potential remains stubbornly elusive. While there is an abundance of published research on the creation of visualizations, dashboards, and predictive models, there has been little work done to explore the impact of learning analytics on the actual practice of teachers. Through the lens of social informatics (an approach that views the users of technologies as active social actors whose technological practices constitute a wider socio-technical system) this qualitative study reports on an investigation into the practice of 30 tutors in the STEM faculty at Europe’s largest distance learning organization, The Open University UK (OU). When asked to incorporate learning analytics (including predictive learning analytics) contained in the Early Alert Indicator (EAI) dashboard during the 2017–2018 academic year into their practice, we found that tutors interacted with this dashboard in certain unanticipated ways and developed three identifiable “shadow practices”.