Due to increasing role of computers, the internet and digital data across many forms of human endeavor is the widespread uptake of the notion of “Big data.” Researchers and educators seem to explore the potential of technology to grab, analyze and utilize huge amount of data in increasingly powerful ways. analysis of educational data is not something new in the field of education but increasing interest towards the use of learning management system, collaborative learning electronic portfolio, moodle, intelligent tutoring system, gaming, sharable content object reference model

(SCORM), e-learning, m-learning, e-assessment, virtual worlds and augmented reality has fueled research in the field of Big data and learning analytics. Learning analytics is a field related to educational data mining. It describes attempts to use digital data about student’s background and learning behaviors in online contexts to monitor and predict student performance. This paper explores the concept of learning analytics, its dimensions, approaches and applications in detail it also describes the relationship between educational data mining, academic analytics and learning analytics.