Education stakeholders are currently working within an environment where vast quantities of data can be leveraged to improve the educational attainment of learners. In his talk, Prof. De Witte will discuss the increasing emergence of 'big data' in education and the associated growth in expertise in educational data collection and analysis. He will expand on how learning analytics may also contribute to the improvement in the quality of education through e.g., fraud detection and student performance prediction. Finally, he will present some tools of growing popularity and potential for learning analytics.

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Kristof De Witte is a full professor (gewoon hoogleraar) in Education Economics and Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven, Belgium, and he holds the chair in ‘Effectiveness and Efficiency of Educational Innovations’ (bijzonder hoogleraar) at United Nations University (UNU-MERIT) at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Kristof De Witte is further a Fellow member of the CESifo Network. At KU Leuven he is program director of the ‘Master in Economic Education’, and the founding member and director of the research group ‘Leuven Economics of Education Research’. ​ The research interests of Kristof De Witte comprise education economics, performance evaluation, and political economy. Among his more than 100 Web of Science publications, he published 71 papers in Q1-journals from which 26 papers in top-10% journals and 10 papers in top-5% journals. Thanks to funding from multiple national and international organizations, he has a strong track record in leading and coordinating large research projects. Stimulated by interdisciplinary research funding, his work touches upon multiple disciplines which is reflected in publications in the leading journals from various academic fields.​ Kristof De Witte shows a deep commitment to public dissemination of his research. To increase societal impact, he is actively disseminating his research output to Dutch field journals, policy journals and media. De Witte’s work has been frequently featured (more than 250 times) in national and international media including CNN, the New York Post, the Washington Post, La Presse and El Pais. Multiple of his papers have had a documented impact on policy making through invited seminars at and citations by the European Commission, European Parliament, the OECD, and the Flemish Parliament. He served as an expert in the ‘European Commission Expert Group on quality investment in education and training’. He is an associate editor for ‘International Transactions in Operational Research’, and former guest editor in three academic journals. ​ De Witte is the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the ‘2021 Pioneer Award’ of KU Leuven (10,000 euro), the ‘2020 Laureate of the Academy’ award from the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (10,000 euro) and the ‘2021 CELSA Service to Society Award’ (honorific). De Witte was keynote speaker at 16 academic conferences. Under his supervision, 15 PhD’s were successfully defended. According to IDEAS (last 10 years publications ranking), he is ranked among the top 5% economists world-wide.​