Course Insights

Course Insights is a Canvas LTI that enables instructors to reflect on data that describes the population of students enrolled in their courses including demographic, majors and minors, semester standing, prior enrollment summaries, and more! Course Insights is a limited access pilot developed by Penn State IT’s Data Empowered Learning Team.

The power of course data at your fingertips

Course Insights is a learning analytics pilot developed for instructors to provide timely, actionable insight into course enrollment and student activity. Through this insight, instructors can more effectively:

  • Identify students who may be struggling
  • Plan course materials with a strong understanding of student backgrounds
  • Understand and account for student activity

Course Insights pulls together a variety of information from across the University and displays it in a simple, easily accessible format.  This tool helps instructors understand where students are in their learning, how they are interacting with online course materials, and what courses they take next.  How this learning analytic data can help, ultimately, is up to the instructor. Some of the most common uses of the data provide within Course Insights include:

  • Designing of lessons that account for student demographics, majors and minors, and previously completed courses, etc.
  • Be alerted when a student is significantly less active in the course compared to their peers
  • Plan future lessons based on engagement patterns
  • And much, much more.

Features

Within Course Insights, demographic data is designed to aggregate information around those students enrolled in any individual section of your course. This aggregated data includes semester standing, cumulative GPA, and the degree programs and plans of your students. Diversity and ethnicity data is also available. Instructors can use this information to inform lesson planning, the creation of learning support materials, or to relate course topics and examples to specific areas of study or interest.
Course Insights Demographics Screenshot
Detailed Description of the Demographics Example

This image is a screenshot of Course Insights bar graph displaying summary data for the distribution of semester standing of students enrolled in this example course. The graph uses different colors to represent various standings. The x-axis shows numbers from 1 to 11, representing the variance in semester standing for students in this course. The y-axis shows numbers from 0 to 350 and represents the number of students in each of these semester standings. In this case, the majority of students enrolled in this course are in their second semester.

Learning Pathways provides you with aggregate information about your students’ course enrollment history. The goal of this data is to help instructors better understand the history of campus and course enrollments for students in their course, as well as to provide a snapshot of current course enrollments.
A screenshot of Course Insights enrollments.
Detailed Description of the Prior Enrollments Example

This Course Insights screenshot displays a horizontal bar graph titled ‘Prior Enrollments,’ which represents all prior enrollments for the population of students enrolled in this specific course. The x-axis, running horizontally across the top of the graph, shows numbers ranging from 0 to 450, indicating the number of enrollments. Each bar on the y-axis corresponds to a different course, listed as follows from top to bottom. For this example course, the graph shows the following prior enrollments: CHEM 111, PSYCH 100, CHEM 110, MATH 110, BIOL 110, BIOL 162, ECON 102, MATH 140, SOC 1, SPAN 2, CHEM 113, HDFS 129, ENGL 15, PSU 6, SPAN 3, STAT 200, and MATH 22. The bars extend to varying lengths across the x-axis indicating how many total Prior Enrollments each course had. For instance, CHEM 111 has the longest bar showing it has a high number of Prior Enrollments compared to other courses.

Any time a student performs a learning action, such as answering a quiz question or posting in a course discussion forum, they generate a digital footprint, an event log of their activity in the tool. Course Insights provides real-time visualization and dynamic alerting around low or zero online course activity to help identify struggling students.
A screenshot of Course Insights Student Activity
Detailed Description of Student Activity Example

The image displays a user interface for Course Insights Student Activity, showing the account of Jessica Smith. The main feature of the image is a line graph titled ‘Rolling 7 Day Average Activity’ which tracks types of activities including: ‘Student Rolling Actions’ in pink, ‘Course Average Rolling Actions’ in blue, ‘Low Activity Warning’ in yellow, and ‘Zero Activity Alert’ in orange. The graph shows fluctuations over time with peaks and troughs indicating varying levels of activity on different dates. Importantly, this graph is meant to be a comparative measure for the activity of a given student in the course compared to their peers and is used as a proxy for engagement in the course. Any point that a student is doing less than 50% of the course ‘Course Average Rolling Actions’, a low activity warning is flagged. Any point that a student is not engaging in the course at all, a ‘Zero Activity Alert’ is flagged. This screenshot is interesting because it provides visual insights into student engagement over time within an educational platform, which could be relevant for educators monitoring student engagement, and facilitates opportunities for proactive intervention and outreach for students who may be struggling with the course.

Impacting reflection for and on practice

The power of Course Insights for instructors is in the tool’s ability to drive not only real-time intervention strategies with students who may be struggling in a course, but also in its ability to enable pedagogical improvements. Key demographic and learning pathway data brings instructors closer to the “real feel” of the students in their courses even before the first day of class. Histograms of incoming GPA curves, listings of prior enrollments, and gender and ethnicity data make it possible to plan and deliver course materials with the students in mind.
A screenshot of daily actions interface.
Detailed Description of the Daily Actions Example

This Course Insights screenshot features a stacked bar graph titled “Daily Actions”, which displays the student’s learning actions per day by learning tool since the start of the course. It is an example of what an instructor might see for this form of data insight in their course. The graph shows the number of learning actions per day for a student since the start of a course. The x-axis represents the sequential dates of a given semester, in this case starting from January 10 to May 1, and the y-axis shows the total activity count, in this case with the count of activities ranging from 0 to 40. There are two sets of colors in this example stacked bar graph: blue for Canvas and purple for Top Hat. The legend explains that daily actions are recorded by supported learning tools like Canvas and Top Hat, with more learning tools to be added in the future. The combined numbers are used to calculate the Rolling 7-day average and cumulative daily graphs.

Join the Pilot!

Instructors

Course Insights is currently available as a limited access pilot for instructors at Penn State.  Over 100 faculty from numerous Departments, Colleges, and Commonwealth Campuses are currently enrolled in the pilot.  If you are listed as the Instructor of record in LionPATH for a course and would like access to Course Insights, please email the Data Empowered Learning Team at delteam@psu.edu

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