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Overcoming the barriers to learning analytics implementation

The following is my reaction to an H817 activity where we are asked to create a short report on implementing a policy of learning analytics to improve teaching and learning. The request was for help developing a plan for rolling out learning analytics, either across the institution or across one section of the institution. My response is an elucidation of what institutional strategy would be involved in implementing a change of this sort, which departments would be involved in and/or affected by and what changes might be required to help ensure success. The stated purpose was a basis for the claim “learning and teaching at this institution are supported by learning analytics”, which the university could place on its website for promotional purposes. 

The following is my response to your request, based on my know-how about implementing technological innovations of this kind; the accompanying institutional change policies that have been found to be necessary in these cases and current TEL research.

Overall approach or strategy
The first point to note is how institutional change, whether within one department or across the whole institution is still on that requires looking at the whole workings of that institution. This is because, as Scanlon et al. (2013, 28) argue, “TEL should be considered as… made up of a series of interconnected elements that cannot be changed in isolation…centred on a vision of educational change.” The management proposed that they will be able to claim on their website that ‘learning and teaching at this institution are supported by learning analytics’ on that basis is not a viable vision as it is not one of educational change. The same authors propose that “TEL innovation should be…design-based research” (p.28).  A more appropriate vision statement would reflect a research-driven approach that considered the full context in which the innovation takes place. Given that, the vision statement would recognise the growing evidence that learning analytics can be a basis for improved quality and sustainability in education, and the need to involve all stakeholders for its potential benefit to be realised.

Which barriers will need to be overcome?
Some of the biggest barriers to TEL innovation and more specifically to learning analytics were identified (for e.g.) by Macfadyen and Dawson (2012); Mosadeghrad et al (2012); Ferguson et al (2014).  Ferguson et al identifies one of the challenges as complexity:  the need to work with learners, educators, administrators and support staff in ways that suit “the practices of those groups, their understandings of how teaching and learning take place, the technologies they use and the specific environments within which they operate”. Ferguson et al. note how this requires “explicit and careful consideration during the process of implementation, in order to avoid failure and maximise the chances of success”. Mosadeghrad et al (2012) are in accord with this viewpoint. They cite poor management, deficient leadership, and lack of strategic planning (p. 193).

The cultural barriers identified in Macfadyen and Dawson (2012) can be categorised as the education’s resistance to innovation and change in and the tendency of educational organizations to add resources rather than strategically allocate them; its tendency to assume learner homogeneity, rather than to explore diversity.  Macfadyen and Dawson (2012) identify "strategic barriers, structural barriers, human resources barriers, contextual barriers, and procedural barriers" (p.193). These include resistance to change that impinges on faculty autonomy, especially if it is perceived to derive from the “cost-consciousness-and-efficiency” as well as unwillingness to accept the extra workload learning how to use complex new tools.

Not exclusive of any of the above cultural, operational and strategic, I also wish to list the psychological domain.  Freud’s theories has been applied to the workplace.  In particular, his theory of psychogenic disturbance of vision could be applied to sentiments like:  'It could negatively affect me'; 'Does it fit with how I do things now?'; 'Does it help me?'; 'It will make me look bad'; 'I get nothing out of this' which from personal experience I can attribute to reactions to forthcoming or proposed institutional changes.

References:
Ferguson, R., Clow, D., Macfadyen, L., Essa, A., Dawson, S. and Alexander, S., 2014, March. Setting learning analytics in context: Overcoming the barriers to large-scale adoption. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Learning Analytics And Knowledge (pp. 251-253). [Online]. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2567574.2567592 Accessed July 23 2020
Freud, Sigmund. (1910). The psychoanalytic view of psychogenic disturbance of vision. SE, 11: 209-218.
Macfadyen, L.P. and Dawson, S. (2012) ‘Numbers are not enough. Why e-learning analytics failed to inform an institutional strategic plan’, Educational Technology & Society, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 149–63 [Online]. Available at https://www.open.ac.uk/ libraryservices/ resource/ article:106516&f=28635 (Accessed 19 July 2020).
Mosadeghrad, Ali & Ansarian, Maryam. (2014). Why do organisational change programmes fail?. International Journal of Strategic Change Management. 5. 189. 10.1504/IJSCM.2014.064460. [Online]. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275590169_Why_do_organisational_change_programmes_fail/citation/download (Accessed 19 July 2020).