Learning analytics is about collecting traces that learners leave behind and using those traces to improve learning. This is a nice definition of analytics for education, partly because it uses plain English, but also because it alludes to the cyclical nature of the analytics process. By running pattern-producing algorithms on past work, it’s possible to highlight pressure points, spikes in performance, and areas of unusual change in your eLearning course. This supports better targeting of resources so that designers, admins, or instructors can make focused refinements to learning content—before the data-gathering stage begins again.