Editorial: Learning design, teacher inquiry into student learning and learning analytics: A call for action

Abstract This special issue deals with three areas. Learning design is the practice of devising effective learning experiences aimed at achieving defined educational objectives in a given context. Teacher inquiry is an approach to professional development and capacity building in education in which teachers study their own and their peers' practice. Learning analytics use data about learners and their contexts to understand and optimise learning and the environments in which it takes place. Typically, these three—design, inquiry and analytics—are seen as separate areas of practice and research. In this issue, we show that the three can work together to form a virtuous circle. Within this circle, learning analytics offers a powerful set of tools for teacher inquiry, feeding back into improved learning design. Learning design provides a semantic structure for analytics, whereas teacher inquiry defines meaningful questions to analyse.