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Learning Analytics is seen as a promising way of improving online education, focusing on how students learn and how teachers’ can help the students’ to be effective in that process. Most approaches rely on the idea of “Big Data” to be the foundation upon which to design for assisting the students’ learning process, the teachers’ scaffolding efforts or enhancement of the interaction design of the software. In this paper, we depart from a case of e-training of clerks in a public organisation. It is argued that learning analytics and educational mining based on “Small Data” (i.e. use-pattern log data from a small set of learners)  also have a promising potential for extracting design guidelines for an e-training environment and not only provide support after the system is developed and implemented, but also guide the design of future e-training systems.