Using learning analytics to support teachers

There is a growing interest in creating analytics systems to support teachers in making informed decisions about the learning process. These systems enable teachers to interact with curated representations of student data for various educational purposes, such as identifying students who may need closer attention, providing personalised feedback, or assessing the effectiveness of their learning designs. This chapter provides an overview of learning analytics systems particularly crafted to support teaching practices. We discuss a number of contemporary teacher-facing systems according to the types of analytics they rely upon (i.e. descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics). The chapter also introduces a theoretical model of the sensemaking processes that teachers engage in while interacting with a learning analytics system. We illustrate how such subprocesses can be supported through in-depth authentic examples in which teacher-facing learning analytics were deployed in three different teaching and learning contexts.