Learning Analytics to Support the Provision of Feedback in Higher Education: a Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

The digital transformation in higher education (HE) makes it important for students to acquire self-regulated learning (SRL) skills. Timely feedback is considered a powerful means for developing these skills, and learning analytics (LA) is a promising approach for high-quality and scalable feedback. This paper presents a systematic literature review on LA feedback tools to improve SRL skills in HE hereby contributing to the understanding of the current state of the art and the identification of remaining existing gaps. After reviewing 31 articles, our results indicate that research on LA feedback tools to support SRL is relatively limited and these investigations often lack a solid theoretical basis in SRL. We also found that these LA feedback tools are mostly targeted to students, and that there is a limited evaluation of the impact of these LA feedback tools. This systematic literature review calls to action to perform empirical research for measuring the impact of these tools.