Significance of Learning Analytics in Enhancing the Mobile and Pervasive Learning Environments

Recently there have been some efforts, albeit limited, to identify the optimal use of the available arrays of data in higher education for many purposes, such as to identify those students who are at risk and to evaluate student dropout rates. In the literature, the two main terms for the efforts made to identify practical ways of making use of higher education data are Academic Analytics and Learning Analytics. For the most part, these efforts tend to focus more on the traditional or non-mobile students´ data, which are pre-stored in many university systems, such as their personal details or tracking information taken from students´ learning activities. However, little attention has been paid to the data of mobile learners. In this paper, the possible benefits of using Learning Analytics techniques to enhance mobile and pervasive learning environments are theoretically examined. Furthermore, we describe our early efforts towards realising the significance of Learning Analytics in the mobile learning environment.