According to the literature, students who are more engaged in learning are considered more likely to be academically successful. Student engagement is defined by Kuh (2003) as “the time and energy that students purposefully dedicate to learning activities.”  iLearn Insights and iLearn logs both provide data on student engagement with course resources and learning activities. 

When student engagement data is helpful:

  • In consideration of grade appeals
  • In consideration of moderation to individual final results
  • In personalised feedback to students about general performance
  • To identify and support students at risk
  • To enable an extra data point (on top of LEUs and LETs) for personal reflection and growth
  • In writing commentary reports at the end of session about your unit and analysis of student results for the course director or area of study meetings
  • In developing action plans for improvement to the Unit

How do you access student engagement data?

Data from iLearn Insights

Below are all the engagement scores that you can get from iLearn Insights for your unit.

  1. Overall engagement, Average login activity, On-time submissions and AIM (Academic Integrity Module) not completed can all be viewed from Unit > Compare past offering:

2. Submission percentage for a particular activity (Quiz, Turnitin and Assignment) can be viewed from Activities > Activity Details

3. Forum participation for a particular forum (number of discussions, number of replies and unique student contributions) can be viewed from Forum > Visualise Forum Interactions

4. Engagement with Echo360 video can be accessed from Unit > Combined echo360 video view
There is no straightforward engagement score for Echo360 video views. You will need to judge engagement by combining relevant Echo360 videos and looking at total number of videos watched by each student and total minutes viewed for all selected videos. You can use the filter options to find the number of students you consider as having engaged with the selected Echo360 videos.

5. If you are a frequent iLearn Insights user, then you can view unit engagement trends for the days you have access iLearn Insights through Unit > Unit engagement trends

6. If you have accessed your Zoom meetings in iLearn Insights during this session, then you can use the Zoom > combine Zoom participation report to find the number of students who attended all your Zoom meetings. Again, there is no straightforward engagement score for Zoom participation in iLearn Insights. You need to calculate Zoom participation percentage based on the selected Zoom meetings and number of students who attended all/most of the selected meetings. The following screenshot is based on 11 saved Zoom meetings in iLearn Insights. Read this TECHE article on Combined Zoom participation reporting in iLearn Insights.


Data from iLearn reports

There are a number of reports in iLearn that can give you a quick indication of the activity in your units. The most simple is to access your participants list (Unit participation) which will show you the last time participants have accessed your unit. This will give you a very quick idea on how recently each student has been active in your unit. You can also access the unit logs and activity reports from the edit cog at the top right hand corner of your unit page and clicking the more icon at the bottom of the dropdown menu.

These reports will give you a quick look at all the activity in your unit, but if you intend to contact students or want to get more detailed information on what is happening in your unit then iLearn Insights contains the reports that will be more useful to you. Both the iLearn reports and iLearn Insights draw from the same data contained in the iLearn database so will provide you the same information on student activity but iLearn Insights reporting has been developed specifically in response to requests from Macquarie staff to ensure staff can see the information in the format that is most useful.


Acknowledgements: Thanks to Shamim Joarder, Lyn Collins, and Jeremy Hind for their valuable contributions to this article.

Images:
Banner image: Strong man photo created by cookie_studio – www.freepik.com
Screen shots provided by Shamim Joarder and Lyn Collins

Posted by Kylie Coaldrake

Learning and Teaching Development Coordinator Office of PVC (Learning and Teaching)

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