Monitoring engagement in Brightspace
Brightspace provides a wealth of data which can be used to see how your students are using the information and resources you make available in the OLE. This data can also be used as an evidence-base to enhance the way you design your content. You can review engagement data at class and individual student level as well as at a module level.
Individual Students
You can begin to understand the learning behaviours and patterns of engagement for individual students using the Classlist tool. A quick look here will enable you to see if everyone is still logging in.
The Login History can be a bit misleading, as students don't need to keep logging in if they are accessing content via Brightspace Pulse. You might want to change the column by clicking Settings at the top of the page.
The Progress Tool is the main place to go in order to see a student's engagement across the range of tools and content in your module. To find it, select Assessment from the navbar, then choose Progress. You will see something like this:
You can then select the dropdown menu next to Login History and choose Replace. This will allow you to put System Access there instead. System Access is a more accurate way of tracking activity in Brightspace if students are using different devices.
Module Insights
From the Progress tool, you can get more information on a student by clicking their name. You are then able to get more information about their engagement with particular tools by selecting from the menu to the side and then clicking the subheading.
Table of Contents Reports
You can also get summaries of engagement with particular content items via the reports in Table of Contents. Go to the Content area, select the Table of Contents, and then choose Related Tools and finally View Reports:
If you then select the Users tab, you will see
Clicking a student's name will then give you more information on their content completion:
It's easily overlooked, but you can also see who has completed a topic by looking at the completion stats at the bottom of a topic page. For example:
Module level insights
On the homepage of your module, you will see a widget called Module Insights. This gives you a quick overview of how your module is being used.
The first thing to note here is that it immediately tells you how many people have accessed your module today, and shows a visual for access over the past week:
This 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.
This 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.
This gives you a breakdown of which tools are being accessed within your module. Use of a wider range of tools generally signifies greater engagement with a module.
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.
The number in the column for Users Visited is a link. If you click it, you will get more detail about engagement with that particular content item. As you can see, this is one way of discovering if a particular user has visited a certain topic, but there are other ways to do that which we cover in our guide for monitoring the engagement of an individual.
