Canvas Essentials: Monitoring Student Performance Using Analytics
In this scenario-based video you’ll follow Dr. Naveen Patel monitoring student performance (in this case her student Taylor Hughes) using analytics. You'll learn how teaching staff can use Canvas to monitor student performance and proactively communicate with students
Video Transcript
Personas:
- Dr. Naveen Patel: Coordinator
- Taylor Hughes: Student (inst11 | instructure11)
Dr. Naveen Patel is the coordinator of a third year Molecular and Cell Biology course with two student cohorts: Face-to-face and online. He wants to make the most of the analytics and communication tools in Canvas to ensure all students are progressing through the course as expected, and no one is falling behind. He also wants to customise learning experiences and differentiate content for students based on their performance.
Scenario
In this video, we’ll show you how teaching staff can use Canvas to monitor student performance and proactively communicate with students.
Dr. Naveen Patel is the coordinator of a Molecular and Cell Biology course. He uses the analytics tools in Canvas to ensure all students are progressing through his course and achieving the set outcomes.
When designing the course structure, Naveen leverages Mastery Paths to customise learning experiences and differentiate content for students based on their performance.
In this case, Naveen has created a video quiz to test the students' knowledge of DNA structure.
At the end of the quiz, Mastery Paths will automatically assign the high performing students with another quiz. The mid to low performing students will be assigned additional content and knowledge checks before receiving the next quiz.
During the semester, Naveen uses the Teacher App to monitor student progress. He notices several students haven’t submitted an assignment, so he messages them in bulk via the app.
When Naveen starts grading the submissions he’s received, he notices that Taylor Hughes has performed poorly. He wants to understand how Taylor has been tracking overall in the course. Canvas provides Naveen with a summary of Taylor’s performance, including details such as when Taylor last logged in.
It looks like Taylor’s low marks for this submission are an exception to the norm. Naveen therefore messages Taylor to see if she’d like to meet virtually to talk through the concepts covered in the assignment.
Naveen then opens the Gradebook, where he sees a summary of all students and assignments, including the assignment status or grade.
As his institution has enabled a plagiarism detection tool, Navenn also sees an originality report with traffic light indicators for each assignment.
Naveen can filter the Gradebook by section, assignment group, or even the module the assessment appeared in. He can also sort the assignment column into highest to lowest grade, submission status, and more.
Naveen notices that Taylor has submitted several assignments after the due date. Based on the course’s Late Submission policy, points have been automatically deducting from her final grades. Naveen messages Taylor again to understand why and see how she’s tracking toward the upcoming deadlines.
Naveen then toggles to the Learning Mastery view. Learning Mastery aggregates assessment outcomes in the course and provides a different perspective of class performance.
Naveen sees a summary of achievement against each outcome. He filters the view to see students who haven’t yet mastered each outcome.
The Learning Mastery view shows Naveen that students have a low level of proficiency in ‘Demonstrate creativity in problem solving’. This is something he couldn’t easily deduce from the gradebook alone.
Naveen is teaching two cohorts of students within this course. One cohort is fully online and the other is campus-based. He filters by Section to see how his online students are performing compared with the face-to-face cohort.
Naveen then navigates to the New Analytics interface, where he can see the average course grade for each assessment.
He overlays the online and campus-based cohort on top of this data. While there is some variance, he’s satisfied that results are relatively similar across the two cohorts.
Naveen moves across to the Weekly Online Activity report to see how each cohort is accessing resources.
He notices that a number of students haven’t accessed the upcoming assessment, and sends a reminder message to these students.
He enjoys being able to quickly send messages to groups of students based on triggers such as submission status, current grade, or whether they’ve participated in an assessment or discussion. This tool sends an individual copy of the message to each student and logs the action within Canvas, so teaching staff can easily see how often they’re communicating with each student.