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This paper aims to review and identify the major patterns and trends in learning analytics practices in higher education institutions. The review covers the characteristics of the institutions, as well as the characteristics and outcomes of the learning analytics practices.

This research collected literature published in 2011-2016 which reported learning analytics practices from Scopus and Google Scholar, covering a total of 47 institutions, and categorised the information about the relevant institutions and practices.

The results show that most of the institutions were public ones in the USA and the UK of various sizes and offering different levels of study. The learning analytics practices were mainly institution-wide, apart from a small number focusing on selected courses. The purposes of the practices were mainly to enhance the effectiveness of learning support and administration, followed by facilitating students’ learning progress. The most common types of data collected for the practices were students’ academic behaviours and their background information. Positive outcomes were reported for a majority of the practices, and the most frequent ones being an increase in cost-effectiveness and understanding of students’ learning behaviours. Other outcomes included the improvement of student retention, timely feedback and intervention, support for informed decision-making and the provision of personalised assistance to students.

The results provide an overview of the use of learning analytics in the higher education sector. They also reveal the trends in learning analytics practices, as well as future research directions.

Despite the importance of the first Chinese language movement in the early 1970s that elevated the status of Chinese as an official language in British Hong Kong, the movement and the colonial state’s response remained under-explored. Drawing insights primarily from Bourdieu and Phillipson, this study aims to revisit the rationale and process of the colonial state’s incorporation of the Chinese language amid the 1970s.

This is a historical case study based on published news and declassified governmental documents.

The central tenet is that the colonial state’s cultural incorporation was the tactics that aimed to undermine the nationalistic appeal in Hong Kong society meanwhile contain the Chinese language movement from turning into political unrest. Incorporating the Chinese language into the official language regime, however, did not alter the pro-English linguistic hierarchy. Symbolic domination still prevailed as English was still considered as the more economically rewarding language comparing with Chinese, yet official recognition of Chinese language created a common linguistic ground amongst the Hong Kong Chinese and fostered a sense of local identity that based upon the use of the mother tongue, Cantonese. From the case of Hong Kong, it suggests that Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of state formation paid insufficient attention to the international context and the non-symbolic process of state-making itself could also shape the degree of the state’s symbolic power.

Extant studies on the Chinese language movement are overwhelmingly movement centred, this paper instead brings the colonial state back in so to re-examine the role of the state in the incorporative process of the Chinese language in Hong Kong.