The field of learning analytics along with its associated methods of online student data analysis holds great potential to address the challenges confronting educational institution and educational research. By merging technical methods for data mining and with current educational theory research and practice, learning analytics has provided novel and real-time approaches to assessing critical issues such as student progression and retention, establishment of indicators of 21st century skills acquisition, as well as personalised and adaptive learning.

See as an example how the University of Edinburgh is using learning analytics.
For further research see: Scottish Tertiary Education Learning Analytics Resource (https://stelar.strath.ac.uk/)