Learning analytics is a big data application in the field of education, triggering the development of the third wave in educational technology, and receiving wide attention from international and domestic academics. The ar-ticle reviews the origin of learning analytics, and then from four dimensions of whom, why, what, how, recalling the past five years relevant research results, and puts forward future development challenges that may be encountered. Spe-cifically, based on macro, meso and micro perspective, this research facilitates related personnel to make education de-cisions, optimize the educational management process and improve the learning process. <br> Research topics cover nine aspects including:learners' knowledge modeling, learners' emotion modeling, learning behavior feature extraction, learning activities tracking, the learner modeling, obtaining degree analytics, the teach-ing resources and the teaching strategy optimization, adaptive learning system and personalized learning, and online learning influence factors analysis. The data mainly comes from the centralized learning environment, distributed learning environment, and physical activity data. The common analysis methods include statistical analysis, informa-tion visualization,data mining, social network analysis, discourse analysis, and web analytics. The challenges in-clude:the difficulty of data preprocessing, the uncertainty of data accessing rights, and the limited application scope. Although the study is still in the initial stages of development, it has become an important part of educational informa-tionization as it provides scientific reference for decision-making at all levels of the education system.
learning analyticseducational data miningsocial network analysisinformation visualization