Welcome to the third edition of the Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference. This year, the medieval and, at the same time, modern city of Leuven, Belgium is the venue where researchers and practitioners of this exciting field come together to discuss current status and future trends. Similar to Leuven, Learning Analytics is an old and new field at the same time. Old, because it deals with a problem that exists since Plato's times: how to improve the way students learn. New, because the tools used to achieve this goal, like Big Data and natural language processing, were not feasible merely 10 years ago. Leuven is also the home of beautiful centuries old buildings filled with young, smart and active students. In Learning Analytics, we can also find established researchers in the fields of Educational Research and Technology-Enhanced Learning, collaborating with a large contingent of new and promising researchers that could be called Learning Data Scientists.