The Supporting Role of Learning Analytics for a Blended Learning Environment: Exploring Students' Perceptions and the Impact on Relatedness

Background: Although blended learning (BL) has multiple educational prospects, it also poses challenges such as keeping students motivated. Objectives: This study investigates students' perceptions of how learning analytics (LA) can be used to support the design of a BL environment in order to promote students' basic need for relatedness, which is a dimension of motivation. Hence, it is hypothesized that sharing LA trends with students and illustrating which course adaptations were performed based on these trends, will result in positive student perceptions and can support students' basic need satisfaction for relatedness. Methods: A quasi-experimental intervention study was executed using a mixed-method approach (N = 257 students) in a BL course in university-based teacher education. The intervention focuses on three types of learning management system LA data (general, content, and background) that are actively used by the instructor. General data consists of generated time on task, content data deals with the content of a learning path and background data includes information about students' previous education. Results and Conclusions: The results show that students' perceptions regarding these LA are positive and most in favour of content data. Moreover, the qualitative data illustrate that students acknowledge the potential value of LA for stimulating relatedness. Implications: Important recommendations for the use of LA in BL environments are (1) interest and commitment by the instructor by means of a powerful course intervention, (2) to consider gathering LA data anonymously on the group level, (3) instructors should communicate about the nature of the collected data, (4) actively process this input and, (5) use it in a formative manner.