LAK

Welcome to Learning Analytics & Knowledge 2015 (LAK15), the fifth edition of this international conference. This year LAK takes place at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, a city located on the banks of the majestic Hudson River, midway between Albany, the state capital, and New York City. The theme of LAK15, Scaling Up: Big Data to Big Impact, reflects our growing community of researchers, practitioners, and learners and our success in leveraging the power of "big data" to create substantial impact within higher education and learning at increasingly larger scales, while simultaneously reflecting the need for analytics to be effective at the level of individual learning (n of 1). Building on the momentum generated in earlier conferences and in recognition of our growth and of our mission 'inventing effective means to improve the way students learn', we have introduced a practitioner track this year. We hope that addressing and discussing the learning from two points of view; that of the researcher/learner and the practitioner, will provide each of us some impulse to think diversely about the many stakeholders in learning analytics and to open new perspectives on the intersection between research and the practice.