Reporting on Staff Department for Central/Shared Courses using Brightspace

Kabir.H.527

I am looking for some advice on how to handle reporting for completions in shared/central courses within Brightspace Data Sets.

In our current organisational structure, we can easily identify the department and faculty for a course offering using the Org Unit Parent dataset. However, an issue arises with courses that do not belong to a specific academic department and are instead managed by a central department.

Here is the scenario we are trying to resolve:

• A centrally managed training course (not linked to a specific department Org Unit) is taken by staff from various departments across the institution.
• Different managers want to know how many of their specific staff members have completed this course.

Since the course offering itself is associated with the central department, but I want to see the data based on the user's home department, how can we link the completion data (or the user) back to the staff member's home department in our report?

Are there specific datasets or joins we should use to associate the user's department information with the course completions?

Any guidance or best practices would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Piero.d.211

Hello Kabir,

Thank you for reaching out to the Brightspace Community with your question. My name is Piero. I am a member of the D2L Product Support team and I'll be helping you today.

My approach in this situation would be to think of this report from the perspective of the Users who completes it, instead of putting the Organisational Unit at the forefront.

I understand that these Users who may not belong to the central department still have enrolments in Brightspace in their own home departments, correct? In this case, you can use the "User Enrolments" Brightspace data set in order to get the information on which department they belong to (because they will have an enrolment in that department at some point in the past).

The "User Enrolments" will only give you the OrgUnitId value of where the User is enroled. If you also need the type and name of the OrgUnit, you will need to join the OrgUnitId from "User Enrolments" with the OrgUnitId of the "Organisational Units" data set.

I suppose that you are using Awards to flag when a User has completed a course offering with training. By cross referencing the UserId of the Users who received the course completion awards with the UserId in the "User Enrolments" data set (and, if necessary, also cross-referencing the OrgUnitId from department enrolments with the "Organisational Units" data set) you will be able to build the report you are looking for.

I hope you have found this information to be useful. Should you have any questions or concerns about it, please, don't hesitate to let me know.

Thank you kindly,

Piero de Sá
Bilingual Product Support Analyst