I have now covered all five main articles in the special August issue of the journal Distance Education on learning analytics (because it is not an open publication). These are:
1- analytics and learning design at the UKOU.
2- analytics and personality traits in a high school in China
3- analytics and gamification in an undergraduate course at a Hong Kong university
4- learning analytics to predict mastery using an online mathematics tutoring system
5- MOOCs and student data privacy: a sentiment analysis based on the terms of service of three MOOC providers.
However, there are also two commentaries on the five articles in this issue, one by George Siemens and the other by Michael Jacobson. I will briefly discuss these commentaries then give my own overview of what the five papers suggest to me about the current use of learning analytics in online learning and distance education.