We are pleased to announce a new tool, Course Insights, now available within Canvas! Course Insights presents a series of instructor dashboards on key performance, engagement, and diversity information about students within your courses.
Course Insights is available to instructors only; to utilize Course Insights, you will need to either access your Canvas course from campus or ensure that you are connected to the campus Virtual Private Network.
This tool was developed at the University of Nebraska especially for our instructor community which means that we are very excited to hear your feedback so that we can make improvements! If there are items you would like to see added or updated, please feel welcome to reach out to us at any time with your questions and suggestions by using the Course Insights Feedback form.
The Dashboards
Activity Turn-in Times
The Activity Turn-in Times dashboard will help you to better understand when the students in your course are submitting assignments. This dashboard will indicate the total number of assignments submitted each hour for every day of the week. Use the filter to view all activity types at once or select specific activities of interest, as well as narrow the range of dates over which submission behavior is shown.
Demographic Info
The Demographic Info dashboard allows you to visualize the demographics within your course in multiple dimensions. Instead of implicitly assuming students align with a majority or idealized background, this allows you to explicitly consider the different backgrounds of the students in their course. It highlights metrics of race/ethnicity, gender, and parent education, while enabling you to consider additional metrics of major, state residency, starting status, rural/urban, neighborhood index, country of origin, GPA, and class standing. For students that have multiple identities in race/ethnicity or major, all identities are displayed in the visualization. You can switch to a categorical view, as opposed to proportional, to foster the mindset of teaching equally to all categories of students in your course.
Learner’s Performance Overview
The Overview of Learner’s Performance in Classroom Activities concisely summarizes and presents average student performance for each of your course activities. Quickly understand how many students are making submissions and meeting due dates as well as what they are scoring on your course activities. Use the filter to restrict the view to show only activities of a specific type or title. You may find this dashboard helpful for understanding how your students’ learning is trending with respect to progression through the course.
Activity Results in Course
The Activity Results in Course dashboard emphasizes an individual student’s performance over time through the display of historical activity scores grouped by activity type, such as homework, quiz, or exam scores. Use the filter to narrow the range of time displayed or select activity types of interest. This dashboard may be useful to understand differences in performance between activity types or determining when to reach out to a struggling student.
Learner’s Workload
The Learner’s Workload in Current Term dashboard presents the number of activities due for each of your students across all of their courses on any given day (up to a maximum display of ‘5’). You may choose to display results for all courses including yours or only other courses. Use the filter to narrow the date range, specify grading status, or select specific students. You may find this dashboard helpful when adjusting delivery dates for assignments or when planning future sections of your course.
Learner's Activity Details
The Learner’s Activity Profile on Canvas dashboard merges assessment of Canvas engagement and course performance. Use this dashboard to quickly identify students who may not be regularly interacting with online course materials then review how those students are meeting deadlines and scoring on activities. You may find it helpful to filter students by the recency of their interaction within Canvas or, once selected, by the activities they have submitted.
Performance Demographics
The Performance Demographics dashboard allows you to reflect on demographic differences within your course based on similar dimensions as visualized in the Diversity Demographcis dashboard. The average grade on an assignment can be disaggregated by a demographic metric. Assignments can be clustered by individual assignments, assignment groups, or modules. You can remove zero scores to examine their influence on the gaps. A link at the bottom of the dashboard provides access to pedagogical resources for closing gaps, and another link provides a dashboard on letter grade differences across semesters.
