Curriculum Analytics for 21st-Century Competencies

in Postsecondary Education

Workshop to be held at LAK26: The 16th International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference

Tuesday, 28th April 2026 at 9.00 AM

<Place>, Bergen, Norway

This interactive half-day workshop brings together researchers, practitioners, and educators to explore how curriculum analytics can advance the development and evaluation of 21st-century competencies in higher education. The workshop will address opportunities and challenges in this evolving field, including building curriculum data infrastructures, developing automated analytical methods for competency modelling, and translating data-driven insights into meaningful educational practices and policy decisions. Through invited talks and collaborative discussions, participants will examine how higher education institutions are integrating 21st-century competencies into curricula, instructional practices, and program reforms. Frontier automated analytical methods will also be introduced. Collectively, the workshop aims to share methodological innovations and institutional best practices, foster interdisciplinary dialogue, and identify future directions for building responsible, transparent, and reliable curriculum analytics systems that support the cultivation of 21st-century competencies for postsecondary education in the age of AI.

Workshop Objective

The main objective of this workshop is to bridge current institutional practices and frontier research in curriculum analytics for advancing 21st-century competencies in higher education. It will highlight how data-driven approaches can support the evaluation of these competencies in relation to teaching practices, student learning outcomes, and graduate employability. The workshop aims to formulate a set of best practices and methodological recommendations for advancing competency-based curriculum analytics, fostering cross-institutional dialogue, and culminating in a shared report or publication that summarises key frameworks, challenges, and future research directions.

Workshop Scope

Current Practices and Policies

The focus on current practices will centre on sharing institutional cases, policies, and data initiatives designed to foster 21st-century competencies, along with benchmarks and standards for reporting graduate employability. It will also include empirical studies examining how teaching practices influence competency development, such as cross-institutional or cross-program comparisons of current practices and policies. The implications extend to how insights from curriculum analytics tools, such as dashboards or teaching centre initiatives, can inform instructional design support and curriculum redesign, ultimately enhancing evidence-based approaches to developing graduate competencies.

Methodology Innovation

The methodology innovation section focuses on emerging research that integrates learning analytics, natural language processing, and generative AI to automate and scale curriculum mapping while ensuring transparency, interpretability, and alignment with institutional goals. It encourages innovative studies that use institutional data to capture and model student competencies. Of particular interest are novel approaches applying Generative AI to curricular analytics, including automated skill mapping, assessment annotation, and the modelling or retrieval of 21st-century competencies in authentic learning contexts. This focus also invites research on integrating diverse data sources, developing open benchmark datasets, and achieving cross-framework alignment.