“Belonging Analytics”: A Proposal

It is well-established that a student’s sense of belonging is associated with successful transition into higher education, along with a raft of positive outcomes including enhanced learning, well-being, and attainment for all students. The importance of belonging was further heightened by the Covid-19 pandemic, as the increased shift to online learning highlighted the challenges of monitoring and supporting student belonging in online settings. A significant challenge lies in the contested nature of belonging, as well as its complexity – students’ experience of belonging is both dynamic and contextual. In creating a new agenda connecting the fields of belonging and learning analytics, we propose the idea of “belonging analytics” to address the challenge of tracking students’ belonging. We present the emerging landscape of belonging by discussing how the advancements in the learning analytics field indicate great potential for the field to explore how digital trace data, narratives, textual data, or a combination, could be harnessed to gain insights into the ongoing experience of belonging, and consequently, to support belonging. We conclude with a set of open questions to interested researchers, to advance the field of belonging analytics.