Exploring Students’ Experiences of Learning Analytics Personalization and Identity Transformation in Higher Education

Abstract

Digital technologies have become integral to higher education, reshaping how students engage with knowledge, instructors, and peers. Within this domain, Learning Analytics (LA) has emerged as a tool for personalizing learning, yet little is known about how students experience and interpret such personalization in their educational journeys. Existing research has primarily focused on quantifiable outcomes, leaving unanswered questions about how learners make sense of personalization and how these experiences transform their learning identities. This study addresses this gap by offering a novel qualitative perspective that foregrounds students’ subjective meaning-making, thereby extending the current discourse beyond data-driven performance measures to include identity and emotional dimensions often neglected in prior studies. This study adopts a phenomenological approach, specifically Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), to uncover the lived experiences of students engaging with LA-based personalization. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students, the study explores how learners interpret and negotiate the meaning of personalized digital feedback. The analysis reveals four major themes: the awakening of self-awareness through data-driven insights, negotiation of control and autonomy, transformation of learning identity, and emotional ambivalence in personalized learning contexts. By identifying these themes, the research contributes an original interpretive framework that conceptualizes personalization as both a cognitive and affective process, positioning it within broader conversations on learner agency and identity formation. By situating personalization as a lived phenomenon, this study expands our understanding of LA beyond predictive models and performance metrics. Unlike previous studies that primarily evaluate technological effectiveness, this research emphasizes the phenomenological depth of learners’ encounters with personalization, thereby introducing a human-centered paradigm to LA scholarship. The findings highlight the importance of designing educational technologies that support identity development and emotional resilience, rather than reducing learners to data points. This original contribution not only deepens theoretical understanding of personalization in digital learning but also provides actionable implications for educational technology design and policy. Future research should build on these insights through longitudinal and cross-cultural studies to capture the evolving nature of identity transformation in digital learning environments.