While I didn't post it here, we're looking at analytics from both the instructor and the student perspectives.
One of our debates was on how and if a student dashboard would be effective in helping students learn how to be "online learners." We're looking at analytics from the perspective of online learning at a community college. We have 17,000 students collegewide and our online FTE ranges anywhere from 3000 - 5000.
The questions that our student brought up are:
Would a learning dashboard motivate students?
What type of student would it motivate?
Would all of our students know how to use it?
And if students were divided into the categories of A,B, C, D, and F students would a learning dashboard make a difference to the C, D and F students?
How could you design a learning dashboard that would make a difference to the C, D and F students?
He did also express that for certain students checking the learning dashboard especially if it compared you to other students in the course may be motivating.
So what we're starting to look at is - could a learner dashboard be developed for an intrinsically motivated student that would show (or teach) them what they should be doing to be successful in the online course...
that would also serve the the student who needs extrinsic motivation in the form of their ranking in class, progress bars and maybe even more elements of social media.
We're really in the beginning stages of seeing how analytics may help us. And this course has been so helpful.