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New Features: Course and Student Analytics

That one more thing we teased with our last release in July? We’re finally ready to announce it, just in time for the 2014-2015 academic year!

Today, we’re releasing two new features to compliment the engagement data report for individual reviews we released in July. Engagement data describes how writers and reviewers engage with their feedback from a single review. Our two new features – the Course-Level Analytics and the Student-Level Analytic reports – aggregate that engagement data across an entire course for all of your students or for an individual.

Every course now has its own “Analytics” report containing the following data:

  • Highlights – get quick insight into task performance statistics and engagement data
  • Trend Graphs – see how performance on key engagement metrics changes over time
  • Average Student Profile – see, in general, how students in your course have performed as writers and reviewers
  • Engagement by Task Type – see how students have performed in each type of task
  • Task Submissions – access every completed task submitted by student from one place
  • Downloads – download all of your student-produced data, including contextual comments exchanged during reviews and engagement data statistics

We believe that the formative assessments contained in these reports have incredible potential for allowing instructors to make effective interventions or shifts in instruction as needed as students work during a course.

However, these reports also work retroactively. If you’ve taught using Eli before, all of this data is available for your past courses as well. While it’s too late to make any interventions with those students, you will certainly be able get some powerful insight into your own teaching – just as our own Bill Hart-Davidson did when he tested these new reports on a class he taught last fall.

Here’s how you can access these reports for your previous Eli courses right now:

  • Log in to Eli using your existing account
  • On your instructor dashboard, choose any course from the “Inactive Courses” list
  • To access the Course Analytics report, click the “Analytics” link in the nav bar
  • To access a Student Analytics report, do one of two things:
    • Click the “Roster” link in the nav bar, then click any student name
    • From the Course Analytics report, click the name of any student
Every Eli course has an "Analytics" report accessible from the main menu.

Every Eli course has an “Analytics” report accessible from the main menu.

As Bill describes, he was surprised by what he learned from the analytics and immediately made some choices about what he can do better the next time he teaches that course. While we know every teacher and course is different, and folks will use these reports in ways we haven’t even imagined, our goal was to enable this type of critical reflection that will allow you to make better decisions about how you teach and what interventions will work best with your students. There is no more powerful instruction than that by teachers with solid data about what works and what doesn’t and how best to devote their resources.

Related Material:

  • Blog: Bill Hart-Davidson takes new Course and Student Analytics for a spin
  • User Guide: Course-Level Analytics
  • User Guide: Student-Level Analytics
  • User Guide: Data Downloads

New Features: Course and Student Analytics was published to the Eli Review Blog in the category Release Notes.

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