Applying Learning Analytics in an Open Personal Learning Environment: A Quantitative Approach

Every activity in the web leaves a digital trace. Analytics are used to measure all gathered traces along with the activities and the traffic that a user provokes, aiming to exploit the application-under-analysis with an optimal way in terms of time and cost. As a result, the question about how are they applied into learning environment, raises. This paper discusses analytics dedicated to the learning process named learning analytics. After presenting their context, and a literature review regarding this relatively new term, this paper presents a methodology that is applied the academic year 2011-12 on HOU2LEARN Environment, an open educational environment set by Hellenic Open University. This methodology consists of social network analysis along with a set of metrics that is also presented. The procedure and the outcomes of this ongoing research so far are discussed.