Course-level Analytics and Reporting Comparator Research

Summary

Moodle’s user-facing analytics tools are once again lacking out-of-the-box. They have considerable potential for hand-crafting organisation-specific tools, reports, and dashboards, but it’s a very intensive, expensive experience to build adequate tools for data and reporting, because the natively provided tools just aren’t very good or comprehensive. That being said, the tools and APIs they provide for creating those custom-built analytics tools are exceptional, making it perfect for universities that do have those resources available, and giving rise to an extremely healthy market of third-party analytics tools and dashboards that fill the void left by the lack of good native tooling.

Canvas’s new analytics tools are fantastic for the K-12 use-case, and their suite is tailored to that market, down to things like their participation measure being specifically tied to definitions stipulated by the federal government for school funding. Their dashboards are well-designed and consistent, and they seem ideal for managing a high-touch mentored environment. While there are still a lot of things requested by the community (which form some of the questions captured in https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14P84xg4bEyyfxTII4VhmUtgWGjYvN_i8Xspuzt6rwuQ/edit), Canvas’ instructor experience seems pretty good.

Skilljar, on the other hand, has a similar level of focus on the zero-touch, self-paced use-case. While Instructure target their analytics at identifying learner problem points and ensuring individual learners succeed, the focus for Skilljar is on solving the problems of training programs - identifying pain points, points of failure, and underperforming content. They also are one of the only LMSes I’ve seen that bothers supporting SCORM specifically in their course analytics, which is an excellent idea, even if I personally hate SCORM.