In 2014 the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) identified three key motivators for faculty use of IT: (1) evidence of benefit to students, (2) course release time, and (3) confidence the technology will work.1
In particular, we found that faculty use of the grade center, which ECAR found that students value more than any LMS function,2 is positively related to student outcomes.
To frame our discussion, consider the following: If you could predict with 100 percent accuracy which students would succeed or fail — in classes, programs, or graduation — what would you do to intervene and change the predicted outcome? Or as Mike Sharkey, VP of Analytics at Blackboard, often says, "If you're a dog chasing a car, what would you actually do if you caught it?"
In our experience, this critical transition from prediction to intervention (and assessment of the resulting impact) is actually quite rare in higher education learning analytics research and practice.