Blog

Brightspace Update for Staff: January 2020 - Data at your fingertips

It's a new year, and we've got a new little feature for you. If you load up a Brightspace module as a member of staff, you’ll notice a new widget appearing on the module homepage. The ‘Module Insights’ widget gives you really quick access to an overview of students’ activity on your module.

As you can see below, you get an overview of course access for the last week without having to click anywhere.

Beyond that, you’ve got three options. Selecting ‘Class Engagement’ will give you an overview of each student’s current grade, when they last accessed the module, and how much they’ve engaged in discussions.

‘Course Access’ will give you an overview of how often the module has been accessed over time. On the right of the picture, you’ll note that you can change the date range for the graph, or filter by the role of the user.

Finally, ‘Tool Access’ will give you a breakdown of which tools are being accessed within your module.

This isn’t the only information available to you on how your students are using the module. Plenty of data is just a couple of clicks away. The ‘Class Progress’ page gives you a list of your students and an overview of how much of the content they’ve accessed and how many times they have logged in.

Selecting a student’s name will go into further detail about how many times they have accessed each topic, and so on. You can see all sorts of useful information, including how far they have progressed through checklists, a more complete record of login history, and links to their assignments and discussion contributions.

There’s more besides this. The best way to discover it is to explore the area yourself.

There is also a very useful set of reports is buried away under the Table of Contents. Navigate to ‘Content’, select ‘Table of Contents’ from the sidebar, and you’ll see a dropdown menu called ‘Related Tools’. Selecting ‘View Reports’ will give you an overview of how many of your students have viewed each topic, and the average time that they view it for.

Selecting the number of users visited will give you information about how many times each student visited the topic and how long they spent there in total.

Selecting the users tab will display a table that shows how many topics each student has viewed.

Clicking their name will display a breakdown of how many times they’ve visited each topic, how long they spent there on average, and when their last visit was.

Finally, you can get a quick completion summary at the bottom of each topic. If you load up the topic and scroll to the bottom, select the ‘Completion Summary’ tab and you’ll see who has or hasn’t accessed the topic.

That’s plenty to be getting on with for now, but if I’ve still got your attention, here’s a reminder about your Brightspace support options.

• There is a 30 minute CPD session most weeks, based around a theme for the month. This is followed by a 30 minute dropin if you have any other questions. The event detals are in our CPD calendar: https://uos.libcal.com/calendar/cpd 
• The Brightspace support materials for staff and students contain a range of tutorials and FAQs: https://libguides.uos.ac.uk/brightspace
• The Brightspace CPD course on Brightspace is absolutely essential to make sure that your modules are designed along the right principles. You can access it by searching once you’re logged into Brightspace.

That's all for now!

Olly Fayers

Digital Learning Designer

Follow me on Twitter for more Brightspace updates: @OllyUoS