With the April 2022 release, you will find a new Brightspace Data Set (BDS) within Data Hub named Course Access Log. You might be wondering – why do we now have two BDSs for course access? This blog post describes each of these data sets so that you can understand the differences. The vision for course access data is to capture and provide data from all the places course access can occur with the total number of accesses per day opposed to aggregating at the day.
Course Access BDS
The Course Access BDS has been available since 2018 and tracks all users accessing all courses through Brightspace (via the browser). In this data set, course access is tracked once per day. If a user accesses a course multiple times within a single day, you will only find 1 record within this data set. This can be observed in the DayAccessed field (see ERD diagram below), which arbitrarily logs all accesses at the same time of day. One of the gaps in this data set is that if a user accesses a course via one of our apps, it is not represented in this data set.
Course Access Log BDS
The Course Access Log BDS is available with the April 2022 release. This data set is intended to begin evolving course access data availability by surfacing data when users access a course through Pulse. Currently, Course Access Log only reports on course access via Pulse. Within this data set we can log multiple course access events per day. For example, if a user accessed a course in the morning and again in the evening, you would find two records for the same day with different times in the Timestamp column.
A Source column is also included in the Course Access Log (see ERD diagram below). Currently, the only source is Pulse. However, D2L plans to include data from other sources as well to provide a comprehensive view of course access.
Figure: ERD Diagram for Course Access and Course Access Log.
Additional information can be found on the User Data Sets page.
The following is a summary of the differences between the Course Access BDS and the Course Access Log BDS:
| Course Access BDS | Course Access Log BDS |
|---|
Source of Data | Brightspace (via browser) | Pulse |
Frequency | Records once per day | Multiple times per day, new access counted for every 30 mins of activity |
Historical Data | Begins 1 January 2021, up to 150 million records | Begins February 2021, up to 150 million records |
Date Information | DayAccessed field - this field only provides the day (the time portion is arbitrarily set to midnight) | Timestamp field - this is a proper timestamp field recording the day and time the user accessed the course in UTC |
Source Column | No | Yes - currently all the data is from Pulse, but the goal for the future is to include data from other sources as well |
How to analyze both data sets together
If you are interested in how you might analyze both data sets together, refer to An Example for Analyzing Course Access in Insights Report Builder, which describes how you can analyze both data sets within Insights Report Builder.
Join our Analytics and Data Access Group in Brightspace Community for more resources and the latest updates.
Change History
28 October 2022: Originally published
23 May 2024: Added link to User Data Sets page
14 August 2024: Updated Historical Data for Course Access BDS
