Aspects Sumac Updates: Comparing Courses in Aspects and Course-level Dashboard Improvements
Value Statement
Course operators don't often need the level of detail course delivery teams need at the course level, but they need access to key high-level metrics to be able to compare a group of courses or even all of the courses available on their instance, identify trends, spot courses seeing high or low enrollment, and pinpoint problem areas that course delivery teams may need to review.
Beyond that, the Sumac release will also include improvements to the course-level dashboards delivered in Redwood. One key addition will facilitate comparisons between selected learners and course-wide metrics.
The work targeted for Aspects for the upcoming Sumac Release will pave the way for future development in multiple ways:
As we start to allow users to compare groups of courses (by allowing users to compare courses that share the same course-level content tag(s)), we will pave the way for future work that will allow users to look at engagement and performance metrics for smaller bits of content such as videos, problems, units, subsections, and sections that share content tag(s).
By adding course-wide averages to the Individual and At-Risk Learner Dashboards, we will just start to scratch the surface of providing more visibility into the individual and at-risk learner group and how they compare to learners across the course. We hope to continue to build on in this future releases with the ultimate goal of allowing users to intervene with these learners at critical points throughout their learning journey.
Key Planned Deliverables for Sumac
New Course Comparison Dashboard in Superset
For the Sumac release, we’ll add a new out-of-the-box dashboard in Superset that will allow users to compare all courses on their instance or to compare the courses on which they are listed as staff (depending on their permissions). The primary goal of this dashboard is to surface high-level information. The high-level metrics surfaced in this dashboard will allow users to compare courses by enrollment, number of active learners, average problem difficulty, and level of video engagement.
We understand from initial research that users often need to be able to compare groups of courses that are similar in some way. For example, users may want to compare courses that teach a similar topic or competency or those that are part of the same track or program. For this initial release, we’ll be allowing users to compare courses that share course-level content tags.
Amendments and UI Improvements to Existing Course-Level Aspects Dashboards
We’ll also be making amendments and UI improvements to the data presented in the course-level dashboards (Course, Individual, and At-Risk Learner Dashboards) delivered in Redwood. First, we’ll add a few key course averages to the Individual and At-Risk Learner Dashboards to make it easier for users to see how these learners are doing in comparison to their peers without having to toggle between multiple dashboards. We’ll make a few labeling tweaks to charts that remain unclear to users based on user feedback. Another key focus of these improvements will be to focus on the quality of metrics presented, not the quantity of items on any given dashboard page. With that in mind, we’ll be reducing redundant information throughout the dashboards.
Beyond Sumac
Detail to be added soon