What is the Course Activity Report?
The Course Activity report in Blackboard Ultra helps you understand how well your students are performing and how much they are interacting with your course.
What can I use the Course Activity Report for?
The Course Activity Report can be used for a variety of things to help you as an instructor support your students. Some of the ways you can use the Course Activity Report are as follows:
- Identify struggling students based on their overall grade, missed due dates, the number of hours they spend in your course, and the number of days since their last access;
- Message students who are falling behind and encourage them to increase their course activity;
- Congratulate students performing well in your course and ask them to be mentors;
- Customize your course alerts to identify struggling students when their overall grade drops below a specific value, they’ve missed due dates, or they haven’t accessed the course for a certain number of days;
- Download a scatter plot of the student course activity as a PDF or image to share information with other instructors or mentors of the course
How do I view the Course Activity Report?
Follow these steps below to view the Course Activity Report:
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To access the Course Activity Report, click ‘Analytics’ from your Blackboard course. It will automatically bring you to the ‘Course Activity’ area and use the ‘Table’ view.
The data displayed in this table view are as follows from left to right;- Student: Student’s first and last name. Additional student information is shown if available: accommodations, additional name, name pronunciation recording, pronunciation description, and pronouns, if these options have been added by the student and/or instructor.
- Overall Grade: A student’s overall grade in the course. If the overall grade column is not turned on or if there is no graded material, this column won’t display information. This column is updated every 24 hours in the early morning, so the overall grade in the report might not match what is currently in the gradebook!
- Missed Due Dates: counts the number of activities a student has not completed before the established due date, including assessments, graded discussions, and graded journals.
- Hours in Course: Number of hours a student has been active in your course. Hours in course are counted from the time students select something within the course to when students select something outside the course. If a student is logged out from their course session, only the time before their last action within the course is counted. This column is updated every 24 hours in the early morning.
- Days Since Last Access: Counts the days since a student last accessed a course. Each time a student accesses the course, the count of days since last access changes to 0. If a student has never accessed the course, days since last access are null and “–” is displayed.
- You can also switch views to see the ‘Scatterplot’ by clicking the Scatterplot icon in the top left corner. The scatter plot’s Y axis represents the students’ overall grades and the scatter plot’s X axis represents the students’ number of hours in the course. The data shown in this view is updated every 24 hours in the early morning.
Each dot represents a student. You can click on each dot to see their overall grade, missed due dates, hours in the course, days since last access, and upon clicking ‘View Details’, you can see if there are any alerts for this student.
How do I setup Student Performance Alerts?
- If this is your first time accessing this view, please consider setting alerts to notify you and your students if they have missed due dates, have not logged in for 2-3 weeks, or have a low overall grade in the course by selecting ‘Alert Settings’ in the top right corner. A menu will appear where you can set the student performance alert settings for the course. By default, the overall grade alert setting will be triggered for students below 50%, the number of missed due dates will trigger an alert at or above 2 missed due dates by default, and the default trigger time for the number of days since last access is above or equal to 10. You can customize these based on your preferences.
- As an instructor, you will see the following in your activity stream if you receive alerts about Student Performance:
How do I reach out to my Students if their Student Performance is lower than expected?
- If you want to message a student or students while in the table view, you can click on the square to the left of their name(s), and click the ‘Send Message’ button in the top right corner of the page. You can also download the information in this view to a .csv file by pressing ‘Download’ in the top right corner.
- If you notice that student performance is low for one or more of your students, there may be many factors that contribute to this. Please consider sending the following message to help support your students:
“Hello! I am your instructor, (your name here), and I wanted to reach out to you because you haven’t been in Blackboard in some time and engaging on Blackboard and in class is vital to your academic success. If you need to learn more about Blackboard, consider playing Blackboard Quest! It’s a gamified learning experience to help you learn how to navigate through Blackboard; it will only take about 30 minutes to 1 hour. I also recognize that there are a lot of external factors that can make engaging with course content difficult. There are a lot of supports out there:
If you’re looking for learning support:
- You can find peer assisted learning support, the test centre, the math & writing centre, and the accounting centre, which will all help you with your unique learning needs, peer tutoring and other academic supports.
If you’re looking for financial supports and resources:
If you’re looking for support with housing:
If you’re unsafe and/or feeling unsafe:
- Find Campus Security services here or download the Humber Safety app, You can also find sexual assault and violence procedures here and conflict resolution support here.
If you’re looking for support with your health and well-being (including mental health):
- You can find health services here and peer wellness services here.
- You can find counselling support here.
If you’re looking for support with an disability related academic accommodation:
- You can find accessible learning services here.
If you’re looking for support for Indigenous Education:
- You can find Indigenous Education and Engagement here.
These and all other student supports, services, and community information can be found at www.wegotyou.humber.ca. I hope to hear from and see you soon!”
Need additional support? The Innovative Learning Support Centre is here to help!
