NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

• 1 Getting started
• 2 Types of Reports:
• 3 Running a basic Log Report
• 4 Running a Statistics Report
• 5 Running an Activity completion Report
• 6 Running a Course completion Report:
• 7 Running a Learning Analytics Report

Types of Reports:

• Adavanced usage: A custom report type developed at the U of A that allows instructors to visually inspect and measure course and student activity.
• Course completion: Allows participants to self-report previously completed courses (e.g. prerequisites) AND can be used in conjunction with Activity completion so participants can view all completed activities based on self-reported checkmarks. Note that this report will only appear in the 'Reports' section if it has been enabled in the 'Course completion' section in the 'More' section at the top menu bar.
• Logs: Shows filtered details based on an activity, participant, date or action and are among the most used for basic checks on course activity.
• Live logs: Shows pop-up window of all course activities within the past hour (automatically updated every minute).
• Activity report: Shows the number of views and related blog entries for each activity or resource.
• Activity completion: Shows detailed list of participants' completed and unfinished activities.Note that this report will only appear in the 'Reports' section if it has been enabled in the 'Settings' section at the top menu bar.
• Statistics: Generates a graph and table of the course logs /user activity.

Running a basic Log Report:

1. Click on Reports located at the top menu bar.
   
   
2. Click on Logs.
   
   
3. Click on the dropdown menus to add as many search filters as you'd like (ie. search for logs based on courses, groups, participants, date, activities, actions, sources, events, and types of logs [standard or legacy]). You may leave some filters blank if you do not want to limit your Report results.
   
4. Click the Get these logs button to generate the report.
   
   
5. Click on the event name to view the log. A new window will appear. The new window shows what page the student was on at that particular time.
   
   
   
   
6. For more details on this process, please see here.

Running a Statistics Report:

1. Click on the gear icon near the top right of your course main page, then on More.
2. Click on Statistics.
3. Click on the dropdown menus to add as many search filters as you'd like (ie. generate a report based on courses, report types, time period).  You may leave some filters blank if you do not want to limit your report results.
4. Click the View button to generate the report.

Running an Activity completion Report:

• See this article.
  
  

Running a Course completion Report:

• See this article.
  
  

Running a Learning Analytics Report:

• See this article.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

The figure below shows a sample report, including the advanced filters and a set of demo posts.

Advanced Filtering Options:

1. Click on Show Advanced
2. The user may select a minimum and a maximum number of words that posts must meet prior to being displayed. Posts must be greater than the minimum (default: 0) and less than the maximum (default: 9999) in order to be displayed. No limits exist on how high or low these values can be set. 
   
   

   Additional Information:

3. If multiple students are selected, students are displayed one by one underneath the header for their names.
4. For each student, under their name, forums selected in the filter are listed one by one. Beside each forum name (on the right), the total number of posts by the student in that forum is indicated. If no forums are selected on the activity filter, then all forums in the course are returned.
5. Posts are displayed under the forum header and links are shown based on the context of the user. Instructors can perform advanced operations such as editing or deleting the post. All users may view the parent post or reply.
6. Clicking this button will display a word cloud based on the words across all the displayed posts. This word cloud can be saved in a PNG image file).
7. Clicking this button will export all of the posts to an Excel document. The exported file can be used to perform additional analysis on the content of the posts.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

• 1  Student List by Criteria Report
• 2  Adding Conditions
• 3  Results Table

Student List by Criteria Report

This report produces a list of students' contact information, filtered by grade, level of participation, or a combination of both. This report can be used to identify students at varying levels of performance and engagement, in order to provide feedback or intervention. This report provides a list of student email addresses that can be copied or exported to CSV.

1. To begin, click on the Reports tab at the top of your main course page.

2. Then select Advanced usage from the list under Reports.

3. Click on Add a Report.

4. Select the Student list by criteria report.

5. Click on the Add button.

 

Adding Conditions

Once you have added the report, you will have the choice between two buttons which will allow you to select the type of criteria (conditions) that you’d like to add. The criteria can be mixed and matched to generate the final list.

The simplest filter to apply is the Grades button, which will allow you to select a grade item from your course, an operator (greater than, less than, or equal to), and a number.

In the example above, the selected options would allow us to filter for students who achieved a grade higher than 15 on the selected 'Midterm' grade item. Click on the + to add the condition.

In a similar fashion, the Actions button allows you to select an activity, action, operator (greater than, less than, or equal to), and a number. This allows a wider variety of options to select different activities (quizzes, assignments, forums etc) or even different topics of content, which can be filtered even further by different actions (i.e., 'View, Assignment submitted', 'Post created' etc). Note that the report will display students that match ALL of the given criteria.  There is currently no way to generate results based on matching ANY of the given criteria instead.

The Dates section can be used to further filter your results using the dropdowns. You can also click on the Show Advanced setting in the bottom-right corner to access the Users per page setting, which lets the user control how many results will be displayed on one page below. If the total number of users exceeds this amount, the results will be displayed across multiple pages.

 

Results Table

Once you are satisfied with the conditions you have selected, click on the Apply filter button. This will generate a table containing the list of students (including their profile picture, full name, and email address) who meet the criteria you selected.

To select individual users from the list, you can click on the checkbox to the left of the user or simply click the checkbox at the top to select all users. If multiple pages are used, you’ll be able to control the active page by using the pagination controls at the bottom of the table.

The copy button in the top right of the table can be used to copy the email addresses of the currently selected users to your clipboard. You can then open an email in Google and paste to drop the email addresses directly in the “to/cc/bcc” field to contact the filtered students.

Note: some older browsers or operating systems may not support adding information directly to your clipboard (newer versions of Chrome or Firefox all generally support this feature).  If this fails, an error will be displayed to you.

There is also an export to a CSV file button in the top right corner that will allow you to export the entire list of filtered students into a .csv document.  The exported CSV document is configured to allow for import into Google contacts so that you can easily create a list of contacts if desired.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

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.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

1. This is the basic filters area, which in most reports contains a student/grade filter, an activity filter, and a date filter.
   • The student/grade filter allows you to choose individual students or subsets (groups). If you select nothing, the report will default to show the data for all the students in your course.
   • Selecting a grade condition will only show students meeting the specified condition.
   • The date filter will limit the results to the specified time period. In a future update, the date filter will automatically default to the current term if that information is visible in the course name. Take note of the calendar dropdown button (  ), which lets you quickly select common lengths of time (last week, 13 weeks, 4 months).
2. x: This is the close button which lets you remove a report from view.
3. Apply filter: This button records your current set of filters and requests the result from the server. After the results are retrieved, they’ll be added to the area indicated by “5”. Note that even without changing any filters, you must click this button to see results.
4. Show Advanced: this will expand a section that contains more advanced filtering options depending on the type of report that is being generated. These advanced options are covered in more detail in the detailed article for each specific report type.
5. This area will contain the results of the report that you’ve generated.  In the image above, a sample of a “Content engagement” report is visible.
6. Action icons: This area includes tools that: export to Excel, export to a .png image file, copy the results to the clipboard, or undo/redo a set of filters.
7. This is the legend area of the report (typically only used for graphs) that contains additional information about the colouring used in the graph.

Most areas contain a help bubble (  ) to provide additional contextual information where appropriate.

Adjusting Graph Size

Analytics reports primarily come in two sizes, small and medium.  If your device resolution is large enough, the larger size of the two will be used. Additionally, if your device’s usable horizontal size is quite large (>1600 pixels), you’ll see a special toggle, pictured below, that lets you adjust between displaying the graphs in "list" view or "grid" view:

In the list view (left icon), graphs are displayed using a medium size and stacked on top of one another.

In grid view (right icon), graphs are displayed using the smaller size, but two graphs can now be displayed side-by-side. Use this view if you’d like to do side-by-side comparisons.

The majority of user testing was done on devices using a 1080p screen, although devices (e.g. laptops or tablets) with smaller resolutions will work well and generally be forced into "list" view.

Due to the more detailed nature of the filters and graphs (and their analysis), it would be difficult to work on the smaller mobile screens. Newer phones (most Android phones, iPhone 6 and newer) can be used to generate some results (provided that they are used in landscape mode) but in general, using advanced usage reports on mobile devices will not provide the best experience.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

To allow students to access their Advanced Usage:

1. Click Participants from your course header, then select Permissions from the dropdown menu:
   
2. On the top of the new page, you will see Advanced role override. Click on the drop down menu and select Student.
   
   
   
   
3. Type 'analytics' into the filter box and change the permission for 'View student analytics report' to Allow:
   
   
   
   

Students will now see Advanced Usage under their profile in the Reports section:

Next, students can select the course they would like Advanced Usage reports for from a drop-down menu (if instructors in more than 1 course have given them access), and then click on Add a report:

Students can add any of the following report types to view their own usage:

• Content engagement
• Content engagement over time
• Forum engagement
• Forum engagement over time
• Forum posts by user
• Grades vs. Actions
  
  

Student Self-Evaluation

Students can use the Content engagement report (or the Forum engagement report) to compare their level of participation to averages for the class as well as for the top and bottom 15th percentiles. This can be useful in gauging in self-assessing the amount of effort they are contributing to the course, especially in relation to top-performing students. For this feature to function, however, instructors need to be using the eClass gradebook to tally student scores - see here for more details.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

Advanced Filtering Options:

1. By default, all events/actions (eg. viewing, posting, submitting) are summed together and displayed on the graph.  However, it is possible to see only a particular type of action by selecting it from the drop-down.  Keep in mind that some actions are specific to certain types of activities, so be sure to adjust the activity filter accordingly.
2. If desired, only unique actions (rather than the total) can be selected to be plotted.  Multiple actions by a single student are counted only a single time for each time chunk (see next option for more info).
3. Granularity refers to how many points in time are calculated to display the graph.  Use the slider to adjust the value and the exact number will be displayed to the right.  By default, the entire time window (Jan 1, 2015 - Apr 30, 2017 in this example) is split into 16 equal chunks of time and actions/events are counted for each chunk.  Increasing the granularity decreases the total length of each time chunk, granting better resolution. Note that requesting increased resolution will require more time to compute and may slow down the display of your report.  If you’re curious about which portions of the graph represent the points, you can hold your mouse near a line on the graph and it will show you a tooltip indicating the closest point.
   
   

   Additional Information:

4. The y-axis for the graph is measured in the total number of occurrences of a particular action/event that is counted while processing the eClass event log.
5. The x-axis contains the dates (and times if appropriate) during which the events happened.  By default, there are only a few time divisions and the graph is quite “rough”.  Increase the granularity to get a more exact picture of what’s happening in your course.
6. The legend contains entries for each item selected in the activity filter.  If no items are selected, a sensible default (common activity types) is shown to the user.  As a user, you may select individual activities, entire sections (aggregates all activities in that section), or activity types (e.g., quizzes, assignments).  If more than 10 entries were selected, arrow buttons will appear at the bottom of the legend to page through the results.
7. Clicking this button will export the results to an excel spreadsheet.
8. Clicking this button will save a screenshot (in PNG) of the graph to your computer.

Anytime a graph displays an activity type (e.g., “All forums”), you are able to click on the entry on the legend and the graph will automatically be re-drawn (and the filter updated) with each individual activity in the course selected.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

The Advanced Usage report suite can be configured to send instructors a weekly report based on the criteria they specify. A weekly criteria report follows the same process as searching for student based on criteria, but permits you to obtain a list of names and emails each week in your inbox. This might be a useful part of a strategy to monitor student participation in your course.

To configure a weekly report:

1. From the main course page, select Reports from the top menu bar, then Advantage usage
   
2. Then click Schedule Report.
   
   
   
   
3. This will launch a page like the following which lets you identify students that match particular criteria and have that list emailed to you weekly. Click on Add more to add a criteria selector to the page.
   
   
   
   
4. The criteria selector page is the same available for the Student List by Criteria report and functions similarly. You can set criteria to be based on Actions or Grades.
   
   
5. You can then select specific activities, sections, pages and any action you wish to select students based on choosing an operator and numeric value, and click the plus icon to add the criteria.
   
   
   
   
6. After pressing the plus button, your criteria will appear in blue. You can enter as many conditions as you want. The example above is set to match any students who have not posted discussions or replies in the 'Help and Support' forum added to this course.
   
   
7. You can then specify a date range you want to check for.
   
   
8. The criteria you've added will appear in blue.
   
   
9. You can check the results returned by your criteria by clicking Test Filter (which tests the criteria immediately, not for the time range specified).
   
   
10. Select from any of the instructors to receive the emailed report.
    
    
    
    
11. The last step is to click Save all.
    
    
12. Any conditions that are saved will now display when the report scheduler is launched.
    
    

The weekly reports are produced and sent early each Sunday morning and contain the list of students matching the criteria and their email addresses (as in the format below).

 

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

Begin by adding a Content Engagement Over Time Advanced Usage report and filtering the report to display a particular student and time range. Click Apply filter to display the graph.

The results graph should look something like the one below depending on the particulars of your course and content. These specific results can be analyzed with an eye to suggesting general concepts applicable to other courses.

In this student's case, the graph shows access to files and pages at regular intervals through the course, as well as a significant number of forums accesses at two larger intervals in the course. This course had a few weeks that were flipped -- where the face-to-face lecture was replaced by online modules -- requiring students to post in a discussion forum so this is apparent in the data. During the other weeks, students were not required to post in a discussion forum.

As it can be challenging to see some of the smaller more regular results 'beneath' the large spikes in forum activity, you can mouseover one of the legend entries to fade out all other lines on the graph except the one you select. The result of this is pictured below (hovering over 'All pages'):

The default view computes only 16 points in time, which amounts to roughly one every week over a four-month period. This shows about one result per week when looking at the graph. To obtain more detailed information about events that occur at specific times, adjust the granularity for the graph under Show advanced.  Since the spikes in forum access occur at only specific weeks in the course, to see a bit more information about those setting the granularity to 128 will increase the detail by adding 8 times as many points in time.

Here’s what that looks like:

Using 8 times as many points in time means that the graph shows roughly one entry per day. Note, however, that the x-axis remains the same: this is because the overall time period being covered is the same. With better time resolution, it is now possible to see exactly on which days events are occurring, rather than those events being 'lumped together' in time. For this particular student, the graph shows the forum peaks tend to happen in pairs and there are actually 3 such instances in the course (week 1, week 2, and week 11) rather than 2. The sets of two peaks suggest that the student was required to post some initial thoughts and later post a final summary of their learning for the week.

You could further clean up the data view and investigate student forum behaviour by showing only those activities, rather than aggregating them together in the graphs above. For example, to see this student's access only to forums, click All forums in the legend to automatically filter the data to only the forum activities in the course.

It is also possible to view student behaviour when accessing static content in your course. To do this, the process is similar to filtering to only forums: select All pages in the legend of the initial graph:

What’s most interesting about this graph is that some of the weekly pages appear at multiple times (the green ones, in particular, seem to be). This shows when the student accessed weekly content in previous or subsequent weeks. Getting a sense of which weeks the student referred to multiple times during the course can help you target changes in focus or structure for future iterations of a course.

To see this clearly, mouseover the particular entry on the legend - here’s an image of mouseover for the week 5 entry:

This shows that the student accessed the page well prior to week 5 and also accessed it after week 5. This is quite different from the red entry, which is very well localized in time (just prior to Oct. 16), but it was viewed about 5 times in total.

 

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

Advanced Filtering Options:

1. Rather than creating a graph with only views and interactions, several basic actions/events are included in this dropdown and can be selected. Keep in mind that these actions are specific to each type of eClass activity, so be sure to adjust the activity filter accordingly. For example: if a series of quizzes are selected along with an assignment event, the graph results will be 0. Leave this filter blank (none selected) to see views and interactions.
2. If you’d like to view unique events (rather than total), select this checkbox. This option counts each student only once, irrespective of how many times they may have accessed a piece of content or performed a specific action. This feature can be used to identify how many total students have accessed a particular piece of content.
3. In addition to the standard bars, selecting an option other than “None” on the average filter will plot a second set of results alongside the first showing average event counts for different sub-groups of your students. It is possible to view average event counts for the top 15% of students in your class, the average across all students, or the average across the bottom 15% of students in your class - based on their scores in the course total column of your gradebook. If you do not use the gradebook in eClass or use a different column as the final grade, these results will not be accurate.
   

   Additional Information:

4. The y-axis for the graph is measured in the total number of occurrences of a particular action/event that is counted while processing the eClass event log.
5. The x-axis for the graph contains entries for each item selected in the activity filter. If no items are selected, a sensible default (visible in the sample) is shown to the user. As a user, you may select individual activities, entire sections (aggregates all activities in that section), or activity types (e.g., quizzes, assignments).
6. By default, “Views” and “Interactions” are shown for each selected activity. “Views” typically involve the student reading some sort of information, while “Interactions” involve a student submission or a student updating/changing content. Click the help bubbles while viewing the report to see a few examples of each.
7. Clicking this button will export the results to an excel spreadsheet.
8. Clicking this button will save a screenshot (in PNG) of the graph to your computer.

Mousing over a bar on the graph will display a tooltip indicating the exact number that is being displayed.

Anytime a graph displays an aggregated activity type (e.g., “All forums”), you are able to click on one of the bars and the graph will automatically be re-drawn (and the filter updated) with each forum in the course selected. You can narrow in on particular results in this fashion.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

\The Advanced Usage reports in eClass can be useful to assess student performance and provide tools to contact students who may need assistance. You can add a report by clicking on the Reports tab at the top of your main course landing page. Then click on Advanced Usage to get to this screen below:

Comparing Students to Averages

Using the Averages dropdown in the 'Show Advanced' area of the Content Engagement Advanced Usage report allows instructors to compare results (for individual students, groups, or the entire class) to results for the top and bottom 15% of the class. The graph below shows such a report with Averages set to 'Top 15% of class'. By not selecting any specific students or groups, all of them will be selected, so it is possible to roughly compare the results across all students with the results across students in the top 15% of your class:

Note that high-performing students had higher levels of interaction in the forums.

By switching the Averages dropdown to the 'Bottom 15% of class' we can see how those students compared to the overall numbers:

Note now that the bottom students had fewer interactions in forums. It is equally possible to select specific activities or simply click on a bar for an entire type of activity or resource (for example, All forums) to check data at a more detailed level. This same approach can be used to compare a single student to the entire class or to the upper or lower groups to get a sense of where their participation level lies in comparison to the rest of the class.

Checking for Students Who Are Not Participating

It is possible to use the Student List by Criteria Advanced Usage report to identify and contact students who are not meeting certain milestones in your course.

Before beginning, it is important to decide on the specific activity that will be used to target to identify these students. These might be assessment items from the course syllabus that students are required to complete, for example, if students were required to post a self-introduction in a forum; or there might be a required reading on a page in your course that students need to read prior to coming to class.

The example case below is focused on a forum post that all students are required to post at the end of a week. To determine who has not submitted, click on the Actions tab.
Then select the specific forum from the Activities filter (in this case 'Peer Evaluation Forum'), then from the drop-down list Actions select 'Post created'. Then select the 'equals' operator, then type '0' in the textbox. Click the '+' sign to add the criteria.
Adjust the dates (if desired - maybe you’re in week 2), then click Apply filter.

The results should look something like this:

In this course, it looks like three Demo Students and another student have not posted.

A similar query could be done to identify any students who have not looked at a particular page: select Actions again, select the specific page, set the action to 'Views', use the greater than operator again, and set the textbox to '0'.

Contacting The Identified Students

The report offers a couple of mechanisms to contact the identified students by email.

If there are only a few students to email, the easiest option is to copy and paste their email addresses: select the students by clicking on the checkbox beside their name or click the select all button at the top left of the list to select all users, then click the Copy to clipboard button on the toolbar.

Start a new message in Gmail, then paste into the “Bcc” field. This will paste the student’s email addresses directly, but not let them see each other's contact information.

If there is a chance that the same group of students may need to receive multiple emails, you can create a contact group in Gmail. To get a google importable csv file with their contact info, click on the Export to CSV button in the toolbar portion of the graph.

• Go to Gmail and switch to the 'Contacts' view to import your contacts.
• Click on 'More' on the google toolbar and then select 'Import'.
• Click on 'Browse…' then navigate to the CSV that you downloaded from the graph.
• Click on 'Import'

Google will import these contacts and then add them to a group called 'Imported MM/DD/YY'. Return to your mail view, compose a new mail, and then type 'Imported' in the 'Bcc' field (again to prevent students from seeing each other's contact information). This will bring up your new group of imported contacts. Click on the one with the correct date, which will auto-populate all of the email addresses into the email. Add a subject, type out your message, and click send.

Scheduling a Weekly Report with Criteria

Specifying criteria to select specific students can also be performed as a part of scheduled weekly reports. Criteria lists are emailed to designated course instructors once per week and can be an effective aid in identifying students who are not participating in your course.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

This report is essentially the same as the Content Engagement report but pre-filtered to only show the forum activities in your course.

Advanced Filtering Options:

1. The default Forum Engagement report shows Discussions created, Posts created, and Discussions viewed. You can filter amongst these 3 types of events in the Actions dropdown.
2. If you’d like to view unique events (rather than total), select this checkbox. This option counts each student only once, irrespective of how many times they may have accessed a forum post or reply. This feature can be used to identify how many total students have accessed a particular forum.
3. In addition to the standard bars, selecting an option other than “None” on the average filter will plot a second set of results alongside the first showing average event counts for different sub-groups of your students. It is possible to view average event counts for the top 15% of students in your class, the average across all students, or the average across the bottom 15% of students in your class - based on their scores in the course total column of your gradebook. If you do not use the gradebook in eClass or use a different column as the final grade, these results will not be accurate.
   
   

   Additional Information:

4. The y-axis for the graph is measured in the total number of occurrences of a particular action/event that is counted while processing the eClass event log.
5. The x-axis for the graph contains entries for each item selected in the activity filter. If no items are selected, a sensible default (visible in the sample) is shown to the user. As a user, you may select individual forums or entire sections (aggregate all forums in that section).
6. By default, Discussions created, Posts created, and Discussions viewed are shown for each selected forum.  Discussions are top-level posts, while posts include replies. Click the help bubbles while viewing the report to see a few examples of each.
7. Clicking this button will export the results to an excel spreadsheet.
8. Clicking this button will save a screenshot (in PNG) of the graph to your computer.

Mousing over a bar on the graph will display a tooltip indicating the exact number that is being displayed.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

The image below shows a sample report filtered for a specific range of time (for more information on basic filtering see Common Features of Advanced Usage Reports).

Advanced Filtering Options:

1. By default, 'Discussions viewed' are summed together and displayed on the graph. However, it is possible to see only a particular type of forum action by selecting it from the drop-down: 'Posts created' (ie. replies) or 'Discussions created'.
2. If desired, only unique actions (rather than total) can be selected to be plotted so multiple views of posts in the same forum by a single student would be counted only a single time for each time chunk (see next option for more info).
3. Granularity refers to how many points in time are calculated to display the graph. Use the slider to adjust the value and the exact number will be displayed to the right. By default, the entire time window (Mar 1, 2017 - Apr 30, 2017, in this example) is split into 16 equal chunks of time and actions/events are counted for each chunk. Increasing the granularity decreases the total length of each time chunk, granting better resolution. Note that requesting increased resolution will require more time to compute and may slow down the display of your report. If you’re curious about which portions of the graph represent the points, you can hold your mouse near a line on the graph and it will show you a tooltip indicating the closest point.
   
   

   Additional Information:

4. The y-axis for the graph is measured in the total number of occurrences of a particular forum action/event that are counted while processing the eClass event log.
5. The x-axis contains the dates (and times if appropriate) during which the events happened. By default, there are only a few time divisions and the graph is quite “rough”. Increase the granularity to get a more exact picture of what’s happening in your course.
6. The legend contains entries for each forum selected in the activity filter. If more than 10 entries were selected, arrow buttons will appear at the bottom of the legend to page through the results. Hover your mouse over an individual to get information specific to that individual.
   
7. Clicking this button will export the results to an excel spreadsheet.
8. Clicking this button will save a screenshot (in PNG) of the graph to your computer.

 

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.

• 1  Adding the Advanced Usage Report plugin
• 2  Questions for consideration
• 3  Digging Deeper into Patterns of Content Usage
• 4  More Questions for consideration

Adding the Advanced Usage Report plugin

The Advanced Usage report plugin in eClass can quickly identify which types of content and specific pieces of content students access most frequently in a course.
To do this, begin by adding an unfiltered content engagement report to your page by selecting the Report tab from the top of your course landing page.



Check the article Viewing the Content Engagement Report for more details on doing this. Using this report will display data for all activities based on their overall type (quizzes, assignments, pages, etc) as our starting point.

Note that not all activities in eClass are created equal -- some activity types (quizzes in particular) tend to generate significantly more events in the logs than others (ie. as every quiz question gets saved during an attempt.) The resulting differences in overall data points is discrepancy is unavoidable as the advanced usage plugin makes use of the regular eClass system logs which are also used for auditing purposes and investigations into performance. For content analyses, it makes the most sense to focus on resources instead of activities.

In the sample course depicted above, the basic engagement report shows that a number of quizzes, pages, files, and forums were all accessed - this result can be refined to include only static content. 

By placing the mouse cursor over the 'All files' bar in the graph, the icon will change to a hand icon and clicking here will cause a new usage query to be issued, narrowing the data to include only files. The resulting graph is shown below (with the file names blurred). Note that this same process of clicking on graph bars could be used to do deeper investigation of any of the overall activities or resources.

The most frequently accessed document happens to be the course outline/syllabus as we might expect. The files are listed in the order in which they appear on the course page so we can see that documents continued to be accessed as the course progressed. In this case, many of the files are similar (think weekly versions of each lecture to print off), but the overall level of access is higher earlier in the course relative to later in the course. The third document in particular seems to be also accessed at about double the average level of the others.

Questions for consideration

• Were students accessing later documents less frequently because they are more comfortable with the course? Or did their attendance (overall) suffer as well?
• Why was the third document accessed much more frequently than the others? Was that piece of content particularly challenging? Did students ask a lot of questions that week?
• If students typically struggle with a particular week of content, did they access the documents more frequently that week? If not, perhaps a different approach can be taken to teach that content.

In general, the information visible here should correlate well with what the data that you receive other means (for example: informally in class). If there is an exception - why do you think it is different?

Digging Deeper into Patterns of Content Usage

A similar approach can be used to examine content usage over time: beginning by surveying all content types in the course, prior to zooming in on specific ones to gain further insights.

Begin by adding an unfiltered Engagement over time report to your analytics page by selecting that report and pressing Apply filter (adjusting the dates if needed) - check the article Viewing a Report of Content Engagement Over Time for more details on doing this. In the sample graph below, we have also increased the Granularity to 128 (under Advanced filters) to get roughly one data point for each day in the course.

In this particular case, the focus is the weekly content pages in the course - filter the results to show only these by  clicking All pages on the legend.

Notice that for some weeks, the weekly page is mostly localized in time and viewed primarily on the week it was assigned. For other weeks, however, the results are more spread in time.
Note: you can switch the display to show only one particular page by hovering over that entry in the legend.

More Questions for consideration

• Why were some of the weekly content only viewed during the week of its use?
• Was it well contained in the course and very clearly explained?
• What about weeks that were viewed sporadically throughout the course?
• Was this content a little harder to digest?
• Was it foundational content that was built upon during the rest of the course? Or were students confused and had to frequently return to re-read?

In each case, the answers will hopefully match up with what you would expect based on the difficulty or the nature of the content. If not, perhaps it’s a good idea to revisit that content, ask your students for feedback, and update it accordingly.

NOTICE: Please be advised that the content of this article may only be relevant for users concluding the final stages of course work on eClass or for users on the eClass External system. The eClass Learning Management System is currently in a read-only state that prohibits new courses, enrollments, and users from being added to the site. Credit courses and co-curricular courses at the UofA are now being delivered on Canvas, and full articles on how to use Canvas can be found here.