The Learning Analytics Review is a series of articles and briefings for those working in the schools, workplace and higher education with an interest in the impact of learning analytics in the short to medium term.

Emotions play a critical role in the learning and teaching process because they impact on learners’ motivation, self-regulation and academic achievement. In this literature review of over 100 studies, we identify many different emotions that may have a positive, negative or neutral impact on learners’ attitudes, behaviour and cognition. We explore seven data gathering approaches to measure and understand emotions. With increased affordances of technologies to continuously measure emotions (e.g., facial and voice expressions with tablets and smart phones), in the near future it might become feasible to monitor learners’ emotions on a real-time basis.