Learning analytics to enhance student throughput and success: A case study of the South African Technology Network (SATN)

Abstract

Universities in South Africa are faced with low student success and throughput rates. These challenges go beyond the strength of the available tools, yet universities continue to use the same tools in addressing their challenges and yet they expect different outcomes. As a result, universities are taking steps towards improving their students’ performance. In addressing these challenges, several universities have taken progressive steps; moving towards a digitalisation of education to apply data-driven decisions. So far, this has been a positive move towards addressing some of the challenges that are contributing to low student performance. This study aims to investigate the potential of introducing learning analytics as a tool to analyse student data and to respond to the low student performances faced by South African universities. Learning analytics is an emerging field with the potential to enable higher education institutions to gather information and thus provide an understanding of students’ learning needs, and to use this to improve student performance and throughput. Learning analytics has been studied and implemented in other countries, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and other parts of Europe. In these countries, learning analytics as one of the systematic ways of analysing data, has been reported to have the ability to improve student success and throughput. It also provides an opportunity for the early identification of students who are at risk. Among other things facing the universities of South Africa, are the factors mentioned above. Informed by the background explained above, the main question of the study is: How will the introduction of learning analytics help South African universities to improve student success and throughput rate? To respond to this question, South African Technology Network (SATN) was used as case study and thematic analysis was applied to analyse the collected data.