Prof. Bart Rienties is Professor of Learning Analytics and programme director of the learning analytics and learning design research programme at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University UK. As programme director he leads a group of academics who provide university-wide learning analytics and learning design solutions and conduct evidence-based research of how students and professionals learn. As educational psychologist, he conducts multi-disciplinary research on work-based and collaborative learning environments and focuses on the role of social interaction in learning, which is published in leading academic journals and books. His primary research interests are focussed on Learning Analytics, Professional Development, and the role of motivation in learning. Furthermore, Prof. Rienties is interested in broader internationalisation aspects of higher education. He has successfully led a range of institutional/national/European projects, and has received a range of awards for his educational innovation projects. He has published over 200 academic outputs, and is the 4th most cited author and contributor in Learning Analytics in the period 2011-2018 (Adeniji, 2019), the 5th most published author on internationalisation in the period 1900-2018 (Jing et al. 2020), the 7th most published author on social network analysis in social sciences in the period 1999-2018 (Su et al. 2020), and the 14th most published author on educational technology in the period 2015-2018 (West & Bodily, 2020).

The Open University UK (OU) has been implementing learning analytics and learning design on a large scale since 2012. With its 170+ students and 4000+ teaching staff, the OU has been at the forefront of testing, implementing, and evaluating the impact of learning analytics and learning design on student outcome and retention. A range of reviews and scholarly repositories (e.g., Web of Science) indicate that the OU is the largest contributor to academic output in learning analytics and learning design in the world. However, despite the large uptake of learning analytics at the OU there are a range of complex issues in terms of buy-in from staff, data infrastructures, ethics and privacy, student engagement, and perhaps most importantly how to make sense of big and small data in a complex organisation like the OU. Our latest research for example shows that:

• Training of teachers to make sense of technology is essential, but non-linear
• Despite working harder and more, not all groups of learners are necessarily performing better over time
• What drives one learner to action by providing feedback may backfire for another learner

During this ICOIE 2021 keynote I would like to share some of my own reflections of how the OU has implemented learning analytics and learning design, and how these insights are helping towards a stronger evidence-base for data-informed change. Furthermore, by sharing some of the lessons learned from implementing learning analytics and learning design within the OU and other organisations we have worked with on a large scale I hope to provide some dos and don’ts in terms of how you might consider to use data in your own practice and context