Practicing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning with Classroom Learning Analytics

This paper draws upon the concept of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and reflective practice widely known in higher education and how it is in line with incorporating learning analytics in the classroom to promote data-driven reflection-on-action. It begins with a brief introduction to SoTL, its history, and how to practice this approach. It then moves on to introducing reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action in connection to SoTL. Following that, a case study is described in which a blended course has been designed, developed, and implemented targeting Japanese undergraduate students. In this report, learning analytics data in the form of course reports generated by the learning management system have been utilized to investigate users' access to and contribution to the discussion boards. These statistics are used as an indicator of the level of social presence within the course. The data has shown that the students were not so enthusiastic about communicating with the instructors, TAs, and other peers online. The few number of posts on the discussion boards, despite the large class size, is evidence for this observation. Some suggestions have been made with the aim of fostering social presence in the current course and other similar fully online/blended courses.