ABSTRACT
Online and mobile technologies are facilitating the accumulation of vast amounts of data across business, industry, government and other areas of human endeavour. People have become dependent on the internet as a source of information for most of what they need to know, for access to entertainment, for communication with others, for purchases and banking and for carrying out their work. This chapter outlines how the field of learning analytics is evolving: what the drivers are for institutions and which existing fields of enquiry are contributing to it. It discusses some of the definitions for learning analytics and to what extent it can be differentiated from other closely related fields. Finally, the chapter looks at what the main current focuses of investigation are and how the worldwide community of researchers, practitioners and vendors is (at least sometimes) working together to build the new domain of learning analytics.
