portal: Libraries and the Academy, Library Learning Analytics: Addressing the Relationship between Professional, Research, and Publication Ethics Vol. 21, No. 3 (2021), pp. 417–423. Copyright © 2021 by Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD 21218.

“The advent of and increasing interest in learning analytics among researchers, practitioners, and administrators alike has academic librarians questioning what roles—if any—they can play in this sociotechnical movement. Briefly, learning analytics attempts to use data mining and analysis practices, including statistical algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, to investigate students’ educational, social, and physical behaviors associated with or indicative of successful learning outcomes. Some cutting-edge approaches to learning analytics even use similar data to evaluate and intervene in professional situations (for example, with faculty, librarians, and advisers). Since student behaviors do not exist in a vacuum, learning analytics also examines, inter alia, the physical and digital resources, educational experiences, and interventions provided by an institution’s faculty and staff to determine what effect, if any, they have on learning.While learning analytics is a fairly new field of study, the academic literature seems to have taken notable interest. Scopus was used to test if this was true. A phrasal search of “learning analytics” in Scopus targeted on anywhere in the document between the years of 2010 (the inception of the field) and 2020 (the last full year of data) returned 12,690 results…”