What is the Engagement Dashboard in Insights?
The Engagement Dashboard provides advisors, and roles interested in cross course engagement for individual learners, a tool to identify non-engaged or at-risk learners and take informed action by including a holistic view of engagement. It pulls together all the ways a learner can interact with their courses and the system to understand the factors that contribute to risk. It aims to meet the following needs:
- Identify non-engaged or at-risk learners
- Ability to take-action and intervene with learners
- Provide individualized improvement suggestions on next steps
We know we are successful when advisors can improve learner success with engagement data from this dashboard.
What’s been updated over the past couple of months?
When we released the new Engagement Dashboard in November 2020, we started off by aggregating learner engagement data: surfacing items like current grade, overdue assignments, course access and time in content vs. grades. The goal was to provide a snapshot of your learners across the courses that you’re monitoring and have permission to view. While in that workflow of identifying at-risk learners and intervention, advisors can save their current view by bookmarking the dashboard’s URL, contacting learners who may need intervention, and exporting the data available if they want to combine with other engagement metrics that they have outside of the LMS.
Since then, we’ve continued to iterate on the dashboard by introducing a Settings page which allows users to define cards and columns and include metrics on their dashboard. End-users and Administrators can both limit which roles are included when populating the dashboard. This will mean that system administrators can restrict certain admin-type roles from showing up for end-users.
What’s available in our most recent release?
With the March release, we have also added individual-learner metrics showing trended data for Grades, Course Access, and Time in Content. You can find these metrics when you investigate an individual learner from the Engagement Dashboard. Each metric has an associated visualization showing how learners are progressing throughout the academic period. Unlike the aggregated view in the Engagement Dashboard, which provides a snapshot of all your learners in multiple courses, the trended data available provides more insight into how a specific learner has been progressing historically across courses they’re enrolled in. This view allows you to get more context of what’s going on for that learner, to determine what intervention may be appropriate.
We know that intervention is a key part of this workflow and that communicating interventions to learners is equally important in that workflow. With that in mind, we’ve carried the email functionality into this view of Learner Engagement.
To ensure that the dashboard is not being populated with information that’s not relevant for you, your view of the dashboard can now leverage auditor relationships. If enabled through a configuration variable, auditor relationships can used as a permission path and just those learners will appear in the dashboard as opposed to all learners in a course.
Lastly, as we continue to invest in the new experience, we have turned off the old Engagement Dashboard. We have seen more and more clients turning on the new experience and their feedback from that has been positive. So that we can focus our attention solely on the new experience, the old experience is no longer available to users with the March release.
What can you expect soon?
Before we wrap up work on our current initiative with the Engagement Dashboard, we still have a few items we hope to introduce.
While Time in Content captures one dimension of engagement, we’ve gotten feedback over the last couple of months that content is often examined in other ways as well. To capture some of the other ways in which advisors are thinking about content, we will be adding in April a new metric for Content View. This will be available in the Engagement Dashboard and show an aggregated view of how often learners view content across multiple courses. This new metric will allow you to assess whether your learners are viewing the content even if they download the content and end up spending their time accessing content offline.
As seen in previous months, metrics like Content View can be configured for your view of the dashboard through Settings. You’ll also find the Settings functionality has been added to the Learner Engagement view as well, so that you can continue to have full control over which metrics are important to you even when you’re looking at a specific learner as opposed to all your learners.
We also intend to introduce a second entry for advisors to access Learner Engagement data located in the Insights Portal. This path will allow advisors to pull up a specific learner that they have in mind and immediately jump to the metrics of that particular learner. This will reduce the distance and workflow needed to pull up those metrics, especially if you already know who the learner is that you’re particularly concerned about.
Though we anticipate there will be more work ahead to fine-tune the new Engagement Dashboard experience, our team will be slowly shifting our focus to adding value to the other dashboards in the Insights Portal. We will continue to gather feedback from users and clients to inform our future updates.