News Story

Closing the gap: Vaclav Bayer’s PhD shows how Learning Analytics can help to make education more equitable

Monday 6 Oct 2025

Vaclav Bayer, who joined KMi as a part-time doctoral student in 2020, successfully defended his thesis on 9 September 2025. His work asks a single, urgent question: can the data we already collect about students be used to tackle the issue of awarding gaps that negatively impact our marginalised students?

Awarding gaps – the unexplained differences in final grades that still appear along lines of ethnicity, gender, disability and socio-economic status student groups – do not just shape university league tables; they echo through lifetime earnings, career progression and social mobility. Vaclav’s mixed-method investigation focused on OUAnalyse, The Open University’s in-house Learning Analytics system.

Vaclav developed a practical framework that any institution can adopt: combining technical safeguards against bias in predictive systems with inclusive design principles and stakeholder collaboration. This approach helps ensure that data-driven tools used in education are fair, transparent, and focused on reducing disparities in student outcomes.

His supervisors were Dr Martin Hlosta, Prof Christothea Herodotou and Prof Miriam Fernandez, while his committee members were Dr Victoria Uren and Dr Estefanía Martín Barroso, with Emeritus Prof Marian Petre as chair.

His next steps? “With the heart of an engineer, the rigour of a researcher and the playfully creative mind of a creator, I want to design technologies that matter and can make lives better. Applied research in industry looks like the strongest route right now, but I’m keeping every option open.”