Blackboard Ultra Course Analytics and Course Activity for Instructors

Blackboard has built-in reports that instructors can run to view information about course usage and activity. You can view summaries of course usage such as which course areas are used most frequently and course access patterns for specific students. This is called Course Activity and can be found in the Analytics tab in your course.

UND has also purchased an additional analytics product called Analytics for Learn. These reports combine extensive data from Blackboard with student and course attributes from our student information system (Campus Connection) to create comprehensive reports and dashboards for our students, instructors, staff, and leadership. These reports can be found in the Analytics tab of your course and then choosing the Premium Reports option.

Blackboard Ultra Course Reports

Here is a summary of the reports that are available to instructors.

Blackboard Course Activity

The Course Activity report helps you understand how well your students are performing and how much they are interacting with your course. All roles with the privilege to view grades can access the Course Activity report. Turn on the Overall Grade feature to enhance your experience with the Course Activity report. You can:

  • Identify struggling students based on their overall grade, the number of hours they spend in your course, and the number of days since their last access
  • Message students who are falling behind and encourage them to increase their course activity
  • Congratulate students performing well in your course and ask them to be mentors
  • Customize your course alerts to identify struggling students when their overall grade drops below a specific value or they haven't accessed the course for a certain number of days
  • Download the table view to a CSV (comma-separated values) file to analyze the data with other tools
  • Download the scatter plot as a PDF or image to share information with other instructors or mentors of the course

View the Course Activity Report help page for more information.

Blackboard Course Analytics

From the Premium Reports tab, select the report you want to run. The report opens in a new tab. You can export the list of students from the reporting system and import the list into an application such as Microsoft® Excel® for further analysis.

  1. Course At-a-Glance
    This report compares the course that you are logged into against other courses in the same department. It compares interactions, submissions, and time in course compared to similar courses in your department. For details and help, please view the Course At A Glance Help Report.
     
  2. Activity and Grade Scatter Plot
    This report plots the distribution of student activity against their grades in this course. For details and help, please view the Activity and Grade Scatter Plot Help Report.
     
  3. Activity Matrix
    This report shows a visual representation of student activity in the course. This report compares each student's number of submissions to the average across all students in that course. The report includes a graph of submission trends over the entire term, number of submissions, the average number of submissions in the course, days since the student's last submission, and the last submission type. For details and help, please view the Activity Matrix Help Report.
     
  4. Course Submission Summary
    This report shows a summary of user submissions for this course. Submission information for each student including assignments, tests, surveys, and graded discussions, blogs, journals and wikis. For details and help, please view the Course Submission Summary Help Report.

Question Analysis

Question analysis provides statistics on overall performance, assessment quality, and individual questions. This data helps you recognize questions that might be poor discriminators of student performance. Question analysis is for assessments with questions. You can run a report before all submissions are in if you want to check the quality of your questions and make changes.

Uses for question analysis:

  • Improve questions for future assessments or to adjust credit on current attempts
  • Discuss assessment results with your class
  • Provide a basis for remedial work
  • Improve classroom instruction

See the Question Analysis help article for more information.

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