To get the most out of the Advanced Usage report plugin for your course, it’s helpful to know a bit more about how eClass logs information in each course. eClass tracks information by recording specific events as they occur in the various parts of the system. The system itself is modular, with the various modules being able to control which events they wish to track. Consequently, to get the most data, it’s important to use the modules which best track events.

This differs from how other systems work or, at the very least, the perception that every click would appear in the Advanced Usage report. For example, eClass does not record where a student’s mouse cursor is at all times or every item they’ve clicked on. Instead, it selectively records specific clicks, which generate the logs used by the Advanced Usage reports.

eClass contains a large amount of 'activities' (quizzes, assignments, forums, pages, etc) that offer various levels of tracking. Some activities tend to generate a lot of events, such as quizzes. Quizzes track each time a student advances to a new page, which, for a large quiz can be quite a number of entries. Other activities tend to generate little or no events, such as labels. Labels are visible directly from the main page of the course at all times, so it’s impossible to tell if a student has viewed or interacted with the label.  This means that content in labels is generally untracked. While labels do carry significant aesthetic appeal, if you’d like to verify that students are reading the content, you’re better off using a page or file resource instead.

Tracking also varies for the portions of a course that are not activities/resources. The most obvious example is the topic/section summary area. This is commonly used to provide information to students, but it suffers from the same problem as labels in that it’s difficult to impossible to track, so no data is kept.

Finally, when adding hyperlinks to your course as part of another activity/area (topic summary, page, label, etc), individual clicks on portions of the activity/area are not tracked. In other words, you can see whether a student has loaded a page in your course, but you can’t see if they’ve clicked on a specific link on that page. If it’s important for you to be able to determine if students have viewed a particular hyperlink, set it up using the URL activity.  The URL activity only has a single function, so there’s no ambiguity about what the student may have done.

Summary (Recommendations)

To receive the most data from your course:

• Organize your content into specific resources or activities as much as possible
• Use pages, books, tabs, or files to deliver content to your students rather than labels
• Never place content you want tracked in the topic/section summary area
• Important hyperlinks should be placed in a URL resource
  

It is important to note that following these rules strictly will likely result in a course that will be less aesthetically pleasing to your students. Try to balance your needs for tracking, but also create a clear and consistent design that will be easy to navigate for students. For information that does not need to be tracked, use a more flexible approach.