The integration of educational technologies in higher education has significantly expanded in recent years, particularly following the transition to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. This shift has resulted in the widespread use of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), which now serve as essential platforms for course delivery, learner interaction, and assessment. Importantly, VLEs generate large volumes of student engagement data, helping educators to apply learning analytics to better understand student behaviour and performance.

Learning analytics, the process of collecting, analysing, and reporting data about learners and their contexts, has become an effective tool to support data-informed teaching strategies. One of its key applications is in assessment design, where it can be used to refine questions, improve alignment with learning outcomes, and enhance overall assessment quality. This is particularly relevant for part-time postgraduate learners, who often engage with content asynchronously and come from varied academic and professional backgrounds, and, also for large and diverse cohorts, where it is challenging to provide individualised feedback and ensure fair, effective assessment.

This paper explores the use of learning analytics to improve the delivery of online assessments in a postgraduate computing module offered to part-time learners studying Software Engineering programme. Drawing on data collected over two academic years, the study focuses on how students engaged with a formative assessment (a mock exam), and how insights gained from item-level analysis were used to revise the summative assessment. Adjustments included refining question wording, revising distractors in multiple-choice items, and updating the marking scheme to better reflect the learning objectives.

The findings demonstrate how data from formative assessments can inform improvements in summative assessment design and support a more targeted, evidence-based approach to teaching and learning.

Keywords: Learning analytics, online assessment, virtual learning environments, higher education.