Aspects - Product Release Notes
The Product and Engineering Teams from eduNEXT and Axim Collaborative are thrilled to introduce Aspects Reports for course delivery teams and site operators! Aspects Reports will be made available alongside the Redwood release via a tutor plugin.
What are Aspects Reports?
Aspects Reports provide access to near real-time course and instance data through dashboards with interactive tables and charts.
How can I find Aspects Reports?
Accessing course-level dashboards from the LMS
Once Aspects has been installed, users can easily access Aspects Reports for a course directly from the Open edX LMS by clicking on a new Reports link on the Instructor Dashboard. There’s no need to navigate elsewhere to gain valuable insight into exactly what’s going on in a course.
On the Reports tab in the LMS, users can navigate between three new dashboards: a course dashboard, at-risk learners dashboard, and individual learner dashboard. These dashboards were designed specifically for course authors and course teams looking to access quick and easy-to-glean engagement, enrollment, and performance data from their courses.
Accessing all Aspects has to offer from Superset
Course delivery team members who plan to view information for one course and then another may chose to navigate to Superset, a third-party data visualization tool used to create and display Aspects dashboards and charts. This will allow these users to easily view the three out-of-the-box course-level dashboards for one of their courses and followed by another and another.
Site operators and superusers can view data about any course on their Open edX instance or their whole Open edX instance in Superset. Users can access Superset directly via a link from the Aspects Reports in the LMS using single sign-on authorization.
Using single sign-on allows users to access Superset directly using their Open edX account without having to create and log-in with a separate Superset account.
Once in Superset, site operators can view a course dashboard, at-risk learner dashboard, individual dashboard for any course on their instance as well as an operator dashboard that displays information about their entire Open edX instance.
Site operators can even use Aspects to create and share custom dashboards and charts in Superset beyond what is provided out of the box with the plugin.
Course-level dashboard highlights
Course Dashboard
The Course Dashboard displays enrollment, engagement, and performance information for all learners in a course.
Because this dashboard displays unit page, video, and problem engagement information for a course, the charts and tables in this dashboard give users a glimpse into how their course content is performing.
For example, when unit page engagement is plotted sequentially across the whole course, course delivery teams may be able to better identify key points in the course where learner engagement drops off.
When cross-filtered by a single course video, the Watched Video Segment graphs can help course authors and teams pinpoint potentially unclear video timestamp ranges.
With a benchmark percent correct figure in mind, users can identify problems that may be too easy or too difficult by sorting the Problem Results table by percentage of attempts correct or incorrect.
Individual and At-Risk Learner Dashboards
In addition to course-wide data, Aspects Reports surface course activity data for individual learners and learners that may be at-risk of not completing the course based on a set of predefined risk factors. The at-risk learner group is made up of learners that have enrolled in the course, done something in the course other than visit the course outline page, have not yet passed the course, and have not visited the course in seven or more days.
When installing the plugin, site operators can choose whether or not to show limited personally identifiable information (PII) to course delivery teams. On Open edX instances that show limited PII to course delivery teams, staff and admin users can see and download the names, usernames, and email addresses of individual and at-risk learners making targeted communication and learner intervention possible.
Key dashboard functionality
Hover to view more detail
Users can hover over any element in a table or chart in an Aspects dashboard to view detailed information.
Add filters to a dashboard
Users can add filters to an Aspects dashboard using the filters panel on the side of each dashboard. Hover over the filter icon on the upper corner of a table or chart to view what filters were applied to create the data visualization on any dashboard.
Dive deeper into the data with interactive charts that can be cross-filtered
All Aspects Dashboards allow users to dig deeper into their data through cross-filters. With cross-filters, a user can apply the same filter to multiple charts and tables in a dashboard at once. For example, if a user adds a cross-filter for a single video on the Video Engagement tab of the Course Dashboard, all applicable video tables and charts will update to show data only for that video.
Download tables and images from Aspects dashboards
Users can easily download the data used to create any chart or table in an Aspects dashboard in tabular format as a CSV or Excel file or download the table or chart as an image for use in their own documents, presentations, or reports.