Learning analytics has been one of the big hyped terms in the past year.  Certainly some schools (U of Maryland Baltimore, for example) are doing a lot with the data. But is the investment worth it at this point? Lev Gonick, in the January 2013 Campus Technology, believes it is overhyped.  He points out that “we need learning theory models to inform our data collection”.  “Just because we have a lot of data artifacts doesn’t mean we know what to do with them.”  I think he raises some valid points.  We need to clearly define the questions we are asking before we start collecting and analyzing data.  It will be interesting to see how learning analytics progress in the next year.