How do I generate/download user content progress report?
I am an instructor. I would like to find out which students have been visiting which pages in my Brightspace course.
I can access this information in two ways:
- For an individual student, I click "Roster" and then select "View progress" from the drop-down menu next to the student's name. I then click "Content" and navigate to the individual pages to see when they visited and for how long.
- To see who has visited a specific page, I can go to that page and click the "Completion Summary" tab at the bottom for a list of users that have "Viewed the Topic."
Neither of these solutions is practical. I have 40+ students and hundreds of pages.
How can I generate/download a report with logs for all users and all pages?
How far back do the access logs go? If I check a student's progress in May, can I reliably find out if they accessed a page in January?
Answers
-
Hi Andre
What you're looking for is the Content Progress Advanced Data Set (ADS). This is filtered by the Org Unit Number of the course you're investigating and I think supports a maximum of two years. This particular data set is helpful as it includes objects from the course that are complete (if you've configured Completion Tracking) or either visited or not visited. (*ADS are former Standard Data Exports which is why they differ from BDS which are themselves more like database tables)
Alternatively you can download the Content User Progress Brightspace Data Set (BDS), and combine it with the Content Objects data set to build your own report in Excel or some other BI tool (Tableau, PowerBI, etc). This is of course more work but in most systems includes the complete history for your organization (data sets are limited to some millions of rows and in all of my clients is their complete history).
Both of these solutions will look more friendly if you combine those data sets with the Users BDS (to add usernames, full names, email addresses, etc) and perhaps the Organizational Structure BDS (to add course name or course code) which will make your report more friendly-to-the-eye.
A note on Content Progress data: You will see "real" and "fake" visits in the data. That refers to whether Brightspace could tell how long a user was on a page based on whether they actively navigated forward to another page or just closed the browser (or let the session time out). Brightspace can only measure 'click' activity and has no way of knowing a users passive behavior (including if they lost internet connectivity).
I hope that's helpful. If you'd like to see how I combine data sets in Excel (including large ones Excel cannot load into a worksheet all-at-once) you can check out this video/article I did:
Best,
Matt
Learning Administration Manager -
Thanks for the reply, @Matt.W.287. This sounds like exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for.
I suspect, however, that I don't have access to this data since I don't have admin privileges. Are these data sets available to instructors? How can I check to see if I have access?
-
Hi Andre
It's quite possible you don't have access to Data Hub. That is a tool that would appear on the navigation bar on the top of the main organization homepage (typically) and if you don't have permission then it won't appear for you.
The Data Hub is not a filtered resource… so if you have access to it then you can see data for all courses. Your institution may have policies about restricting that to the LMS administrators.
You would have to ask one of your LMS Admins to produce this report for you. Alternatively, if you have Performance+, Insights Report Builder could be used to create a report that could be embedded on your course's homepage for you that would be filtered to the correct OU#. That again would be a task carried out by your LMS Admin and then provided to you.
Yet another possibility would be for this to be created as a Custom Report in Brightspace which you could be granted permission to see. Those last two options would involve engaging with your Client Sales Executive if your site didn't have those tools enabled.
I hope that's helpful.
Best
Matt -
Unfortunately it's not very helpful in my case, @Matt.W.287. I don't have the necessary privileges and I don't see that changing. (My institution is extremely apprehensive about doing anything unusual when it comes to this sort of thing.) Instead of accessing data reports from the source, I've come up with an alternative solution. (I've written a Python script that scrapes the data from the individual student progress pages.)
I have a couple follow-up questions:
How reliable is the data displayed on the Content Progress pages?
Here's a screenshot of part of one student's Content Progress page:
The student appears to have spent just 1-3 seconds on each page (not nearly enough time to read through everything I'd written on those pages). Is it safe to assume that the student simply clicked through each page without really looking at the material?
Does the time spent on each page reflect the cumulative time or just the time spent during the last visit?
Here's another screenshot:
Did this student spend a total of 3:32 on the page over all three visits, or is that just how much time they spent during their last visit?
-
Hi Andre
I would say that you can rely on the data displayed on the Class Progress and User Progress pages.
I'm not 100% certain the Content Progress page shows cumulative time, however the Data Set shows cumulative (labelled as such) so I rather presume that's the case.
Judging by what you showed above, it absolutely looks like someone cycling page-by-page without actually reading the content. That doesn't mean that anyone with "Last Visited" date/times in such close succession never read the content, but judging by the cumulative time (a) they haven't read the content, and (b) they routinely click next-next-next to navigate their way through the pages when looking for something.I hope that's helpful.
Let me know if you get any results inconsistent with these conclusions.Matt
-
Thanks, @Matt.W.287. This is very helpful.
