3. Support for operational decision-making

The benefits of data analytics in education go beyond learning and teaching processes, and data on students and stakeholders at the administrative level can also provide important insights. A field with a different focus, but related to learning analytics, is academic analytics.

Three students working on a laptop with charts displayed above them

Definition.

Academic analytics is focused on the collection, analysis, and visualisation of educational data in order to generate institutional insights and improve decision-making (Tsai et al., 2022). In a broader sense, academic analytics is closely related to business analytics and uses data to support the management of higher education institutions, while in a narrower sense, it may also include students’ academic achievement, overlapping with learning analytics (Ferreira & Andrade, 2016). In general, academic analytics supports higher education institutions in operational and financial decision-making (van Barneveld et al., 2012), while learning analytics is more focused on students (Tsai & Gašević, 2017).

The results of academic analytics are more often used by those in management positions (Agasisti & Bowers, 2017).

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