Learning analytics made in France: the METAL project

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to present the METAL project, a French open learning analytics (LA) project for secondary school, that aims at improving the quality of teaching. The originality of METAL is that it relies on research through exploratory activities and focuses on all the aspects of a learning analytics environment.

Design/methodology/approach

This work introduces the different concerns of the project: collection and storage of multi-source data owned by a variety of stakeholders, selection and promotion of standards, design of an open-source LRS, conception of dashboards with their final users, trust, usability, design of explainable multi-source data-mining algorithms.

Findings

All the dimensions of METAL are presented, as well as the way they are approached: data sources, data storage, through the implementation of an LRS, design of dashboards for secondary school, based on co-design sessions data mining algorithms and experiments, in line with privacy and ethics concerns.

Originality/value

The issue of a global dissemination of LA at an institution level or at a broader level such as a territory or a study level is still a hot topic in the literature, and is one of the focus and originality of this paper, associated with the large spectrum of different concerns.

Citation

Brun, A., Bonnin, G., Castagnos, S., Roussanaly, A. and Boyer, A. (2019), "Learning analytics made in France: the METAL project", International Journal of Information and Learning Technology, Vol. 36 No. 4, pp. 299-313. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJILT-02-2019-0022