Using Learning Analytics to Guide Learning: An Analysis of Marketing Assignments

The increase in interest of marketers to explore the meaning of messages and brand sentiment in social media programs such as Facebook, Blogs and Twitter has seen increased demand for ever more sophisticated text analysis tools. Such developments in text analysis are finding their way into other applications and hold potential for education through the assessment of text based writing in assignments. This paper reviews a number of learning analytics tools and presents the results of a project which has analysed assignments for a marketing management subject in a masters course. Results are presented for five criteria identified from the subject's marking rubric and analysed through a computer program featuring word statistics, readability, term search and natural language processing. The results are compared to human marking grades. The findings highlight the opportunities such approaches have in guiding an understanding of student performance, supporting tutor moderation and in providing feedback to students.