Skilljar - Platform-Level Analytics and Reporting
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Skilljar’s site-level analytics dashboard contains a large amount of useful data, and a lot of it is queried in real time rather than overnight jobs like the other platforms.
A Skilljar site can provide courses to many domains, so the first set of filters available allows an organisation administrator to select single or multiple sites under their control:
They can also filter their view between a specific date range, or by specific user groups (groups in Skilljar exist external to the courses, and are designed for things like clients, tracking promo code performance, and other arbitrary meta-level groupings).
On the dashboard itself, there are a range of important metrics that are displayed as tiles:
These are:
Active Students
Learners who have accessed a course lesson during the time window
Returning Students
Learners who were also active before the selected time window
New Students
Learners who became active for the first time in the window, so Active Students will always = Returning + New Students
Course Enrollments
Course Completion
Path Enrollments
Path Completion
These track path-related metrics, where Paths are Skilljar’s equivalent of programs - collections of courses in a sequence
Average Session Time
This is total session time divided by number of active students
Total Session Time
Certificates Granted
Live Event Enrollments
Revenue
Each metric shows the current versus the previous equivalent period, coloured according to whether it has increased or decreased.
Accompanying these metrics are trend graphs for 3 key time-based metrics:
Daily Course Registrations - The number of course registrations per day.
Daily Active Students - The number of unique active students per day.
Daily Session Time - The average time students have spent on lessons per day.
When hovering over daily course registrations, it displays the course registrations and completions in that time period. Why this is hidden behind a hover on this tab is beyond me.
Alongside this data, Skilljar also offers lower-level dashboards for the following areas:
Paths
This dashboard simply shows path registrations and completions. Each learner entry can be opened to view a learner’s progress through a path, how long they have studied each step of the path in real time, their enrollment dates, completion dates, certificates, and their last active date in each course in the path.
Groups
Provides 3 charts and graphs for learners within specific groups in the chosen time window:
Per learner session time
Per learner activity - The Y axis isn’t actually labelled on this graph, and the documentation is unclear. I’m assuming that this is showing the number of interaction events.
Per learner Enrollments and Completions - how many courses they enrolled in vs completed in the window
Courses
Provides a table of all courses with the following data:
Course Name
Registrations
Completions
Session Time (how long learners spend to complete the course)
Clicking a course takes you into the course-level analytics for that course, which I’m intending to look at separately because this is already a ton of stuff to pack into this doc.
Students
Provides a table of all learners with the following data:
Student name
Email address
Domain (which Skilljar site they’re on, as accounts can manage multiple sites)
Registrations
Completions
Signup date
Last activity date
Available credits (Skilljar’s ecommerce option allows learners to be assigned or purchase credits which are redeemed for course access)
Clicking a learner’s name gives you access to their profile data, including their session time per course, enrollments and groups, and activity dates.
The Active Students tab allows you to get a list of students who were marked as active during a chosen time window. The only data on this report is Student name, Email, and Domain.
Quizzes
Provides a table with an overview of all quizzes across courses with the following data:
Quiz title
Course name
Quiz completions
Average score
Passing score
Average time
Time limit
This data is also available in a By Quiz view, which aggregates all courses where the same quiz has been used.
Clicking into the quiz gives finer-grain information on quiz analytics. I’ll cover this in more depth in the course analytics doc.
Enrollments
Provides a table displaying all enrollments with the following data:
Student Name
Email address
Domain of the course
Course title
Tags associated with the course
Date of enrollment
Completion date
Link to the issued certificate (if applicable)
Certificate expiration date
Date of latest activity
Custom signup fields (if applicable)
Clicking a student’s name gives you access to a learner’s profile data, just like the student report. The main difference between the two higher-level reports is that the enrollment report is designed specifically for tracking learner performance, whereas the learner report is designed to provide overall learner profile data.
SCORM
Provides a table with all SCORM packages across the account with the following data:
SCORM item (the name of the item in the course)
Web package (the name of the package, in case it’s labelled something different in the course)
Average score
Finished count
Success count
Average total time
By default, only active SCORM packages are listed. Their documentation has a link to historical ones that isn’t present in the UI, for whatever reason.
Clicking a SCORM package provides deeper data on how SCORM packages were answered, which once again I’ll cover in greater detail in the course analytics doc.
Live Events
Provides a table of data about live events associated with courses, with the following data:
Live event name
Live event start time
Live event instructor - the email address of the instructor who led the event.
Course name - The course the event was a part of.
Course completions - The number of times the course was completed. Of note - live events can themselves be considered courses.
Live event registrations - The number of unique users who registered for the event.
Live event attendants - The number of unique users who attended the event.
Attendance rate
Clicking on a live event displays all students who registered for the event, as well as who actually attended. It also displays the scores achieved by the learners who attended, as live events can include graded activities, as well as their “success status”, as passing the course can be a binary measure rather than a grade.
All of the above reporting dashboards can export the currently filtered data in CSV files. Requesting a CSV download schedules an asynchronous data dump, which sends a download link to the admin’s email address. Previously small amounts of data could be downloaded straight from their dashboard, but they apparently changed it all over to asynchronous download links last year.
Strategic Insights
The Strategic Insights dashboard is Skilljar’s special sauce, which deserves its own section. The dashboard shows the performance of the customer’s courses, benchmarked against industry trends and all other Skilljar customers. The following benchmarks are available:
Skilljar Global - the global average of all Skilljar customers.
Learner Audience Size - based on the yearly number of learners. This is broken into three groups:
Small: Under 1,000 learners
Medium: More than 1,000 learners
Large: More than 10,000 learners.
Program Age - based on the time since the site’s launch date. This is broken into three groups:
Less than one year.
More than one year.
More than three years.
Skilljar also mention additional benchmarks being available for higher-tier customers, but they are non-specific about what those benchmarks are. Audience size and program age are only available to higher-tier plans.
The following metrics are available for comparison:
Average completion rate.
Average number of enrollments per learner.
Average Session time per learner.
You can view the interactive demo of this feature from this link: Skilljar Academy - Strategic Insights
And this link includes their marketing materials on the feature, which are worth reading.