Mashite Tshidi
The growing digitisation of teaching and learning in higher education has intensified interest in learning analytics as a means of supporting personalised learning through data-informed pedagogical decision-making. In South African higher education, this interest is shaped by massification, inequality, and pressure to improve student success and completion, positioning learning analytics as a strategic response to structural challenges. Despite institutional investment in analytics platforms and data strategies, personalised learning remains unevenly enacted in practice. This study examines how institutional, technological, and instructional conditions shape analytics supported personalised learning in a South African higher education institution. Using a qualitative case study design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven participants involved in analytics, instructional design, academic support, and teaching. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings show that personalised learning emerges from the interaction of three interdependent conditions: institutional commitment and governance, technological integration and data coherence, and lecturers’ interpretive and ethical capacities to translate analytics into pedagogical action. While leadership support legitimised the use of analytics, fragmented data systems and uneven data literacy constrained coordinated instructional responses. Conceptualising these dynamics as a socio-technical configuration highlights how the design and governance of analytics systems shape pedagogical possibilities for equitable personalised learning.