Community Learning Analytics - Challenges and Opportunities Ralf Klamma RWTH Aachen University Advanced Community Information Systems (ACIS) Informatik 5, Ahornstr. 55, 52056 Aachen, Germany klamma@dbis.rwth-aachen.de Abstract. Learning Analytics has become a major research area re- cently. In particular learning institutions seek ways to collect, manage, analyze and exploit data from learners and instructors for the facilitation of formal learning processes. However, in the world of informal learn- ing at the workplace, knowledge gained from formal learning analytics is only applicable on a commodity level. Since professional communities need learning support beyond this level, we need a deep understanding of interactions between learners and other entities in community-regulated learning processes - a conceptual extension of self-regulated learning pro- cesses. In this paper, we discuss scaling challenges for community learn- ing analytics, give both conceptual and technical solutions, and report experiences from ongoing research in this area. Keywords: learning analytics, community learning analytics, visual analytics, community of practice, expert identification, overlapping community detection 1 Introduction Learning Analytics (LA) [1] and Educational Data Mining (EDM) [2] have be- come major research areas in technology enhanced learning recently. LA is con- centrating on assessment of formal learning processes in blended or online en- vironments. Following [3] it has its roots in business intelligence (BI) and data mining (DM). The Horizon Report 2013 writes: Learning analytics, in many ways, is “big data,” applied to education [4]. Consequently, research concen- trates on predicting and steering the learning progress of individual learners un- der the premise that an institutional learning management system (LMS) is de- ployed. Support is facilitated by recommendations of learning content or learning activities. In contrast, Community Learning Analytics (CLA) comprises the identification, analysis, visualization and support of informal community- regulated learning processes. Professional communities of practice (CoP) are learning informally. CoP are groups of people who share a concern or a pas- sion for something they do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better [5]. In CoP formal learning or training management systems’ use is in- significant. Instead, an ecosystem of learning tools and resources is used which is