It’s crucial that students know what changes are taking place and the importance of remaining engaged, it’s not going to be as easy to see who is disengaged whilst remotely teaching, depending on how staff are delivering sessions and the Module Leaders and PAT tutors can play a critical part in keeping students engaged. If possible, offer your students support and perhaps a drop in, group tutorial or 1:1 via Teams. Many students will feel unsettled, anxious (and possibly also bored) and proactively checking with them that they are doing OK is something that many will welcome and show that the university does care about them.
As your students may be using a variety of online platforms, module leaders will need to be aware what is being used, and there are some built in tools to help view activity:
My Studies
There are a range of reports and tools in Blackboard for checking student engagement.
The Performance Dashboard
In particular the Performance Dashboard gives you, the instructor, a quick overview of your students’ activity on your module. You’ll see the date when they last accessed the module, number of days since accessing the module, number of posts they may have made in a discussion board, review status (if you use it) & grades held in the Grade Centre. More on The Performance Dashboard can be found here
Teams
Manage Team
Then select Analytics. This tells you how many ‘active users’ are in your Team:
Teams Analytics
To view activity for a specific user, go back to the Team members list and hove your mouse over a name and select the organisation icon:
Select the organisation icon
Then from the screen you arrive at, select Activity:
View activity for a member of your Team
You’ll now a see a chronological list (most recent at top) of any discussion activity within the team. Please note this doesn’t include any private chat messages, nor does it measure any interaction with files (e.g. editing group files etc). It is purely displaying any group chat messages the student has written.
Who attended a Meeting or Lecture in Teams?
During a Teams meeting it is possible to see who present using the Attendance List button:
To download attendance, click the show participants button, then download reports. You’ll get a basic .csv file detailing who joined and left the meeting, and the times they did so.
After a Team call you can see a summary of how many people posted (in this example there were 54 posts from 9 people):
Meeting attendees
If you hover your mouse over the text you can see details of all attendees:
Meeting attendees – details
Panopto
Panopto has wonderful granular data about video viewing. Including top-watched, minutes watched, interactions, etc.
Go into your Panopto folder on a module/course area. You can get the statistics for the entire module (1) or on individual videos (2).
You can see videos watched, when they were viewed, etc. The dropdown list defaults to the last 7 days, but you can choose other time-periods (1) There’s also a download button (2) to pull the data out of Panopto as a .csv file that can be opened in Excel.
Further down the page, there’s a top sessions table that talks about the most popular videos in the module/course, as well as the views and minutes delivered, etc. As above, there is a download button for getting a .csv file (1) and also a ‘See All’ choice (2) if you would like to see the data on ALL of the videos, not just the top-watched ones.
