Contextualising Learning Analytics with Classroom Observations: a Case Study

Educational processes take place in physical and digital places. To analyse educational processes, Learning Analytics (LA) enable data collection from the digital learning context. At the same time, to gain more insights, the LA data can be complemented with the data coming from physical spaces enabling Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA). To interpret this data, theoretical grounding or contextual information is needed. Learning designs (LDs) can be used for contextualisation, however, in authentic scenarios the availability of machine-readable LD is scarce. We argue that Classroom Observations (COs), traditionally used to understand educational processes taking place in physical space, can provide the missing context and complement the data from the colocated classrooms. This paper reports on a co-design case study from an authentic scenario that used CO to make sense of the digital traces. In this paper we posit that the development of MMLA approaches can benefit from codesign methodologies; through the involvement of the end-users (project managers) in the loop, we illustrate how these data sources can be systematically integrated and analysed to better understand the use of digital resources. Results indicate that CO can drive sense-making of LA data where predefined LD is not available. Furthermore, CO can support layered contextualisation depending on research design, rigour and systematic documentation/data collection efforts. Also, co-designing the MMLA solution with the end-users proved to be a useful approach.