Monitoring Admin and Instructor Activity in Brightspace

Eunice.D.2616

Does Brightspace offer a feature that allows a super administrator to track the actions and changes made by other admins or instructors—such as an activity log or audit trail? I frequently receive this type of question from users who want to ensure accountability and better oversight within their learning environment.

Janet.O.779

Hi, @Eunice.D.2616.

Based on my experience with Brightspace as a Super Admin since Nov. 2019, I'd say no, not in a centralized, comprehensive way such as you're asking about (i.e., not like in an LMS like Moodle).

There are limited-scope logs in various places within the system, but most seem focused on data which is relevant to monitoring students, not other administrative or teaching staff.

At times I've been able to cobble together somewhat useful data through detailed detective work, such as checking things like the following:
- last accessed dates/times shown in the Classlist
- last modified date/time stamps at the bottom of the editing view of course resources
- draft saved and/or published dates/times stamps shown on hover within Assignment "View Submissions" listings or Quiz "Grade" listings
- "View Event Log" results in Grades for grade items or students

Technically, there is also the "Instructor Usage" advanced data set in Data Hub… but I haven't found that report any more detailed/comprehensive than the previous methods I listed, and it's less convenient to use. There might be other data sets you could draw on, but I don't remember right now all the ones I've tried. The "Impersonated Session History" log was useful to me a couple times, but it's not one I need to look at often.

I think at one point I asked a question about this and was told that I could ask Support and/or Customer Success for more detailed reports not available to me via the user interface. I have done that on a few occasions and received useful data (e.g. ePorfolio Usage), but due to the wait time involved, that approach has seemed more applicable to extraordinary situations rather than to everyday ones.