Student preferences and attitudes to the use of early alerts

Learning analytics is receiving increased attention because it offers to assist higher education institutions in improving and increasing student success by automating the identification of at-risk students, thereby enabling interventions. While learning analytics research has focused on detection and appropriate interventions, such as early alerts, there has been little investigation of student attitudes and preferences towards receiving early alerts. In this paper, we report the results of a study involving three first year units that sought to determine the opinions and preferences of students on their attitudes towards the interventions; how to best contact students; their academic issues; type(s) and quality of communication with the teaching staff; and types of university services required and received. We found that the majority of students did want to be alerted, preferred to receive alerts as soon as performance was unsatisfactory, and strongly preferred to be alerted via email, then face-to-face then phone.