Monitoring Student Engagement in Brightspace

Unit Overview Widget

• Dashboard on unit homepage for staff, displaying unit access and engagement data.
• Provides high-level aggregate information and links to specific reports.
• Visualizes weekly unit access and student quiz submissions.

Benefits of Unit Overview Widget

• Quick access to weekly student engagement metrics.
• Class Engagement Report shows which students accessed content, participated in discussions, and current grade distributions.
• Course Access Report highlights student access times, useful for asynchronous tasks.
• Tool Access Report reveals which tools are most frequently used by students.

Class Progress Report

• Accessible via the Analytics link on the unit navigation bar.
• Monitors overall student progress and provides basic indicators for individual analysis.
• Students have their own version called My Progress to track personal data.

Benefits of Class Progress Report

• Displays total content visit percentages and detailed breakdowns by module.
• Login history available for the past month, detailing dates and times.
• Individual student interactions with discussion forums can be tracked.
• Overview of quiz attempts, checklists, and survey completions for each student.

Discussion Statistics

• Provides insights into student activity in discussion forums.
• Accessible through the Communication tab under Discussions, with a Statistics tab.
• Useful for monitoring participation and gauging topic engagement.

Benefits of Discussion Statistics

• Review activities at the forum and topic level.
• Track individual and group interactions relative to overall totals.
• Statistics exclude unapproved and deleted posts, ensuring accurate data.

Content Usage Report

• Offers insights into student engagement with course materials, detailing visit counts and average time spent.
• Content categorized by module and topic, with detailed breakdowns by individual students.
• Can export data to CSV format for further analysis.

Panopto Analytics

• Analyze views and downloads of recorded videos, assessing student engagement and drop-off rates.
• Provides graphs for total minutes streamed and student interactions like note-taking.

Gradebook Statistics

• Displays grade distributions, mean, median, mode, and standard deviation for assignments.
• Drill down into individual student grades to assess overall class performance.
• Access through the Grades section in the unit navigation bar.

Quiz Activity

• Review overall class scores, grade averages, and individual quiz question performance using the Quiz Statistics report.
• Accessible via the Unit Admin section under Quizzes.
• Data helps determine the effectiveness of quiz questions and areas needing improvement.

Intelligent Agents

• Automate monitoring of student activity to identify login patterns and content engagement.
• Notifications can be sent to instructors or directly to students as needed.
• Useful for managing large cohorts and providing timely feedback or reminders.

Best Practices for Using Data

• Analytics can guide engagement strategies but may not always be fully reliable due to shared logins or incomplete interactions.
• Encouragement and positive feedback through analytics are as important as identifying areas for improvement.

This quiz explores the Unit Overview widget used for monitoring student engagement in Brightspace. It provides insights into unit access and offers visual data representation for instructors to assess student participation. Test your knowledge on how to utilize this tool effectively.