Analytics on students use of your online teaching content: Logs, Activity report, Activity completion and more

Logs

Logs drill into individual student activities. When you contact Moodle support because a student has claimed they were unable to submit to Turnitin despite accessing the inbox before the 2pm deadline, this is the first thing we check.

1. Click into course management (cog icon in top left)
2. The reports are available under the User Links column
3. Select the module you want to find logs for (by default it will be the module you’re on).
4. Choose the student’s name (listed alphabetically by surname) or look at all participants.
5. Select the day you want, or leave it as all days.
6. Select just a single activity, or look at all the activities.
7. If you are looking for something specific that a student might have done you can drill down further using the actions menu, for instance, for an assignment submission you could select ‘all changes’ to remove the log reports of students simply viewing pages without any actions.
8. If you have more than one page of results, you will be able to click through them.
9. Each line of the logs captures a user action:
   • The time and date.
   • This captures where the user was, and you can click this link to go to that resource or activity.
   • The event name and description explain what the user was doing. Sometimes these are worded in an obscure fashion, so please ask us if you aren’t sure what it means. This example below shows a successful Turnitin submission, where the user adds their submission and Moodle then sends the file to Turnitin.

2. Live logs

Live logs are useful to check when working on the site so you don’t confuse users. They look similar to the standard logs, but you don’t have all the filter options.

Course participation shows how students are engaging with a particular activity:

1. Click into course management (cog icon in top left)
2. The reports are available under the User Links column
3. Select the activity/resource you want to review.
4. Choose how far back you want to look.
5. Make sure you are only looking at students.
6. Press Go to load the report.
7. If you have a large class, you may want to filter by name.
8. Students who have completed the activity are shown with Yes beside their name.
9. Students who have not completed the activity have a No.
10. You can select students and then scroll to the bottom of the page, where you will find an option to send a message to those selected.

The activity report is good for identifying usefulness of resources and activities. It shows a simple count of every single time it is clicked and by how many students. E.g it will tell you that a resource has been clicked on 30 times by 6 different users. It doesn’t tell you how many of these clicks are by each user.

Although it can’t tell you how many of your students have completed a task (use course participation for this) you can still draw some useful conclusions from this data. For example, something that has a very high number of hits is probably useful to students, so perhaps consider providing more of this kind of resource or activity. Likewise, if you see something has a very low number of hits, it could mean that students are not aware of it or why it would be useful. You may want to change the name or description of the resource, or draw students’ attention to it with an announcement or in class.

Statistics captures when your course is used (and when it is not…!). To view statistics you need to click into Course management (cog icon) and into Course administration (under Course Settings), choose course administration and then click into the Reports tab:

When viewing statistics:

1. Choose how far back you want to look, and press View.
2. The graph shows you how many students and teachers have accessed your course in that time frame.
3. The data is also underneath in tabular format, linked to the logs if you wish to dig deeper.

N.b. you must enable this option at the start of your module. Activity completion is very similar to Course completion. It’s an easy way to get a quick picture of a student’s participation. It can be set up so that students need to manually check boxes to indicate whether they have completed something, or it can be set up conditionally so that the box will automatically be checked when certain conditions are achieved.

For Activity completion to work, you will need to enable it (please note this cannot be done retrospectively after the module has run). Go to the course administration, and under Course settings, click Edit course completion settings. Under Condition: Activity completion you will see activities you can monitor.

1. If you have a large class, you may want to filter by name.
2. The activities that have checkboxes are listed across the top.
3. Each student has a row of checkboxes showing what tasks they have completed.

This report shows you who has achieved tasks. It can be set up so that students need to manually check boxes to indicate whether they have completed something, or it can be set up conditionally so that the box will automatically be checked when certain conditions are achieved.

1. You can filter the report by name.
2. All activities are listed across the top. You can scroll along the list using the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom.
3. The students’ names are listed down the side (these are example students).
4. Against each student’s name, you will see 4 types of check boxes.
   1. A solid unchecked box, indicating the student has not manually checked the box.
   2. A dashed unchecked box, indicating the student has not met the conditions to complete a task.
   3. A solid checked box, indicating the student has manually clicked the box.
   4. A dashed checked box, indicating the student has met the conditions to have the task marked complete.
5. You can download the data as a spreadsheet to perform more detailed analysis.

The Session attendance report provides an overview of when attendees joined and left sessions. It also gives you an idea of how long attendees were present in the session on average.

Guidance is available on the Blackboard help site.

It is easy to find out how many students have viewed your videos. You can see which students have viewed (depending on set up), how long they view the session and also see which parts of your recordings were most viewed.

Recap (Panopto) usage statistics guidance