Textbook prices have been soaring at an unprecedented pace for the last four decades with no signs that this trend will end anytime soon. Several studies have suggested that a solution to this problem comes in the form of open textbooks. As a result, the growth of open textbooks is rapid and sustained. However, though the advent of open textbooks is encouraging, whether, how, and to what extent students are using their open textbooks remains unclear. Learning analytics for open textbooks can provide answers to these questions plus many others, and thereby offers the potential for improving planning, development, monitoring, evaluation and revision of open textbooks. Learning analytics applied to open textbooks has received little attention to date. This on the horizon paper presents and describes developmental work of a method to collect data produced as a result of students’ online and offline interactions with their open textbooks, the first part of a three-step process of learning analytics (the remaining two being data processing and reporting functionalities). The paper concludes with a presentation of future work, in line with the nature of this paper, which is work-in-progress towards developing learning analytics system for open textbooks.
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