Data
2016-2017
Course Access
The analytics tool I use most often is the course access report. The data in this tool seems to correlate more closely with student achievement in the course than any other simple measure. Students who are consistently logging into the course are far more likely to pass the course than those who remain absent for more than 2 days in a week. The best part is that this data has predictive ability. If I run the report the day before a due date, I can tell which students are at high risk for not turning in the weekly assignments on time. A quick email to the parent will sometimes prevent the due date from being missed, and often provides parents enough time to motivate the student to turn in the work with a minimal late penalty.
Grade Maps
The grade heat map is a wonderful visual tool for analyzing grades by student and by assignment. For example, I can easily see that "Composition and Inverse" quiz was a sticking point for the students. While this information is all present numerically in the grade book, the color codes help me to visually identify patterns that I might otherwise miss when just looking at the numbers. This report is most helpful for planning future administrations of the course.
Quiz Question Stats
Now that I know students struggled with the "Compositions and Inverses" quiz, I can pull up the question statistics for this quiz to see which questions were most missed and what distractor answers were commonly chosen. This information will help to drive instruction for remediation and future administrations of the course. I can tailor my online sessions to address the most common misconceptions and can provide supplemental problems to help clear up these misunderstandings. Sometimes the question analysis is also useful in identifying biased or bad questions.