Educators have been collecting data on their students for as long as they’ve been teaching. The decision to award a student a letter grade of A, B, C, D or F, based on their performance, creates a data point for someone to analyze. Contextualize those grades by considering the method with which a person was taught, their home life, their sleep habits or any number of other variables and — congratulations! — you’ve generated some very primitive learning analytics to assess. Bart Collins was working in IT at Purdue University in the early 2000s when he and his colleagues first started looking for ways to harness the information they were gathering through early learning management systems.
