Learning Analytics in Higher Education — The Path Toward Educational Management Intelligent Systems

The rapid expansion of information and communication technologies in relation to big data analysis generates the vital demand to gain the maximum benefit of the 'big data'. Business intelligence and learning analytics are recently drawing considerable attention in market and society being one of the most competitive and profitable areas of interest to businesses and organizations, including higher education institutions. Business intelligence systems have already demonstrated significant impact on strategic decision making and trends forecasting. Learning analytics is going to extend the value of business intelligence in the field of education and training in proportion to retention, students' success and satisfaction. Hence, the overall organization's performance and ranking -in a wider scope-will be transformed toward informed, timelier, high-valued, evidenced and high-quality decisions benefiting the students, and accordingly, achieving sustainable organization's performance in a middle term, and society advancement in a longer term. This paper focuses on investigating the potential of business intelligence approaches toward a meaningful analysis of the organization's and student's experience by making use of business intelligence enhanced learning analytics. It provides valuable insights into the integration and use of business intelligence in the learning analytics application area by highlighting recent research and developments. Furthermore, it suggests paths to resolving current issues in the interrelationship between higher education institutions' and learning performance by designing a novel closed-loop feedback framework that aims at improving the learning outcomes for the students, and the organization, and prepares for smart educational management.