Using Course Analytics

Analytics is a dashboard view of how your students are doing in the course. You can see how the class is doing overall or how a particular student is doing in your course. The dashboard data is refreshed every 24 hours. You can view analytics in both active and concluded courses, so you can evaluate while the course is running or do a retrospective review.

Available analytics include course grade, weekly online activity, and communication. By default, the analytics page displays an interactive chart graph of all data. However, you can view data within a table at any time.

In the Students tab, you can view the number of page views and participations for each student. In the Resources tab, you can view the resource name, how many students viewed or participated in the resource, and the number of page views and participations for the resource. You can message students who meet certain criteria, who did/didn't view a resource, or did/didn't participate in a resource. You can filter the student list by All Resources or by a specific resource.

 

As instructors, we often have a sense of which students are struggling, which activities aren't working well, and that greater participation results in better grades. Course analytics can provide you the data to turn that intuitive sense into an actionable item. Course analytics can help you to:

• Predict how students react to course activities.

By watching participation trend lines you will see activity patterns around certain activities, days of the week, or even times of the day. This can guide you in planning future activities, announcements, or support strategies.

• See which students are at-risk and need help.

You can see when students last logged in and how often they have participated. This can help you catch students who aren't engaged before they fall too far behind. You can compare a student's grade to the course average for an assignment to see who needs extra support. You can message students who fall within a certain range of scores, are late or missing assignments, or who have not viewed specific resources or participated in activities. Students who know their instructor cares enough to message them are more likely to stay engaged.

• View how effective your teaching strategies are in allowing students to learn.

Are some resources viewed a lot and others never opened? Do some discussion questions generate more responses than others? Are the grades on certain assignments consistently low? Analytics can help answer these questions so you can target your course improvements where they will have the most impact.

• See a quick view of what your students are achieving in your course.

You can view the average grades as well as the low and high scores for each assignment. Get a daily and weekly view of student resource views and activity participation. Compare individual students against the class averages in grades as well as participation. You can look for correlations between participation and achievement. 

 

How to turn on New Analytics

New Analytics is a the upgraded version of the standard analytics. It will replace the current version in the near future so we encourage you to use this version. It must be activated in each course individually.

1. Go to Settings in your course navigation menu
    
   
   
2. Click on the Feature Options tab
    
   
   
3. Click the red X icon next to New Course and User Analytics. Select Enabled from the dropdown menu
    
   
   

Guides to Using Course Analytics

Watch the New Analytics Overview Video Links to an external site. first to understand how the tool works.

• ❑How do I view weekly online activity analytics in a chart? Links to an external site.
• ❑How do I view analytics for an individual student? Links to an external site.
• ❑How do I send a message to all students based on specific course criteria? Links to an external site.
• ❑How do I send a message to an individual student? Links to an external site.