Promoting inclusive and engaged student learning with analytics: engagement via agency

Student engagement is a contested concept. Important in the conceptualisation of engagement is the distinction between ‘engaging students’ and ‘students engaging’. While the former focuses on enabling and encouraging engagement through the creation of structured opportunities for learning, the latter, while not reducible to a single definition, emphasises the importance of engagement as an active process, a process of agency (see Bryson, 2014). As argued by Barnett and Coate (2005), encouraging and enabling students as active and
reflective citizens, supports them in confronting and evaluating their learning experience in a way that extends ontological engagement, promoting learner agency to support the development of a deeper sense of belonging and citizenship. This workshop will build on a research undertaken at the University of the West of Scotland and communicate the findings of a project that extended the use of learning analytics. Whilst engaging with learning analytics provides educators with the potential to understand more about effective student
engagement and learning in higher education, this workshop will explore student understanding of learning analytics and the development of a data profile to support learner agency. Framed around a learning in partnership method and methodology, the workshop will use the student voice to provide evidence that by engaging students as active ‘agents’ and ‘partners’ in the development of their own learning experience, enables them to recognise their potential to change the learning landscape and inform their own learning
experience and the wider curriculum.