As of the January 2021 (20.21.01 release) you will find a new Advanced Data Set (ADS) - Course Offering Enrollments - available within Data Hub. You may be wondering – why another enrollment ADS? We are providing the Course Offering Enrollments ADS for clients that are interested in knowing the current state of all enrollments (in course offerings) on a daily basis. This is not feasible with the Enrollments and Withdrawals BDS differentials or the Enrollments and Withdrawals ADS as these data sets are not able to report on implicit enrollments or withdrawals.
As a reminder - an Explicit enrollment (or withdrawal) is purposeful, based on direct user action – for example when a user is enrolled into a Course Offering through the Class List. While an Implicit enrollment (or withdrawal) is based on an indirect action – for example enrolling a user into a department with a cascading role – this implicitly enrolls the user into all course offerings within the department.
As with many other ADSs, the Course Offering Enrollments ADS will allow you to scope the results by providing an OrgUnitId as well as a Date Range to filter your results. Both of these filters are required and we STRONGLY recommend that you scope the ADS down to say - a semester – to ensure the ADS can run in a timely manner – as you can imagine – this will be a lot of data! Also take note that the Date Range filter will scope your ADS based on enrollment date. For example, if a learner is enrolled in a course offering on January 1 and was still enrolled in the course offering on February 15, then running this ADS with a Date Range of February 1 - February 28 would not include that learner because the filter applies to the date when the learner became enrolled in the course offering.
When you run the Course Offering Enrollments ADS you will be provided with a report on the enrollments - both explicit and implicit enrollments - for only course offerings under the provided OrgUnitId.
The Course Offering Enrollments ADS contains 5 columns:
- UserId
- OrgUnitId
- RoleId
- EnrollmentDate
- EnrollmentType
We are presenting the first three fields as Ids and not names - which is different from other ADSs. However, this was done purposely to optimize its performance (by minimizing the number of joins that need to be done). As mentioned, this ADS can result in a very large number of records being returned. In order for you to get the names of Users, OrgUnits and/or Roles you can join the results with the associated Brightspace Data Sets if needed.
As an example of how you might use this ADS, you can pull this report daily if you want to know all the enrollments for course offerings within a semester (OrgUnit). Any changes to those enrollments from one day to the next would be inferred as an un-enrolment or withdrawal. The withdrawals will not be included in the ADS. Users can compare today’s output with yesterday’s output to look for users that are no longer in the report and therefore were withdrawn. This provides a way for you to determine both explicit and implicit withdrawals without overloading the data set with too many rows which is currently not available or feasible with existing Brightspace Data Sets differentials.
The following table helps to summarize which types of enrollments and withdrawals are available, unavailable or can be inferred from each of the available enrolment data sets.
User Enrollment BDS
- Explicit Enrollments: Yes
- Implicit Enrollments: Not available
- Explicit Withdrawals: Not available
- Implicit Withdrawals: Not available
Enrollments and Withdrawals BDS
- Explicit Enrollments: Yes
- Implicit Enrollments: Not available
- Explicit Withdrawals: Yes
- Implicit Withdrawals: Not available
Enrollments and Withdrawals ADS
- Explicit Enrollments: Yes
- Implicit Enrollments: Not available
- Explicit Withdrawals: Yes
- Implicit Withdrawals: Not available
- New Course Offering Enrollments ADS
- Explicit Enrollments: Yes
- Implicit Enrollments: Yes
- Explicit Withdrawals: Can be inferred
- Implicit Withdrawals: Can be inferred
We hope you found this article helpful. If you have additional questions about the new Course Offering Enrollments ADS, please feel free to create a post in the Data and Analytics Community Group or reach out to your account team.