Learning Analytics (LA) has emerged as a significant area of research in the field of technology-enhanced learning. It automatically analyzes educational data in order to enhance students learning experience and to foster their learning. Open learning analytics (OLA) extends this field in that it integrates data from distributed and heterogeneous sources, serves different stakeholders with very diverse interests and needs, and leverages a variety of statistical, visual and computational tools, methods and methodologies. This paper presents an OLA platform called PANDA that is currently being developed as part of a German research and development project. The platform allows different learning systems to publish data about learners and their contexts, and applies different methods and techniques for information visualization and discovery to analyze the collected data and to detect interesting patterns within.
