Course Overview Widget - Engagement, Access and Tools

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Relevant to: faculty and staff

This article contains information considered accurate at the time of publishing. Technology updates, changes in University security practices, policies and procedures may effect the information in this article - updates to articles are scheduled on a periodic basis and will address any required changes.

What is the Course Overview Widget?

The Course Overview widget is a tool that lets the instructor of a course view pages for Class Engagement (for each individual student) as well as Course Access and Tool Access (both of these tools can provide an overview for each Empire course role).

How to view Course Access

The course access page provides an overview of who has accessed the course. It can be filtered to display one or more roles. This may be useful for examining aggregate student engagement in the course or to check colleague access if you are developing a course.

To view the Course Access page:

This is a view of the Course Overview widget on the home page of a sample Brightspace course. A graphical display of the number of times the course was accessed is shown in the image along with three options for tools: Class Engagement, Course Access, and Tool Access. The "Course Access" tool is highlighted.

From the home page of the course where you wish to view Course Access records, scroll down past the Table of Contents and the Quick Eval widget to the Course Overview widget .
Select the “Course Access” option from the listed options in this widget to navigate to the Course Access page.

How to Use the Course Access Page

This is a graphical representation of the number of times a course has been accessed over two time periods. The first graph indicates the number of times the course has been accessed over a one-week span while the second graph indicates the number of times the course has been accessed over its lifetime.

Displayed in this page will be a time line view of all access events over the last week as well as access events from when the course was first created.

You can filter this view by both a time range and by role. To filter by time range, simply use the date picker entries to select a start and end date. This will refresh the time line above to fit your chosen dates. The default settings display the past 7 days.

When filtering by roles, please note that you may see roles that are not associated with Empire State University in this view by default (these outside roles do not have access to any Empire University courses or primaries, they appear there because of the way Brightspace is configured in the SUNY instance). To limit the view to only Empire State University roles:

This image displays a partial list of the roles available to an instructor while filtering for role in the Course Access widget. The options to select roles beginning with "ESC" are highlighted. Selecting these options will toggle those roles to be filtered or not filtered.

Select the first item in the list. This will typically read as something similar to “60 items”. This will unselect all items in the list.
Scroll down the page until you find items starting with the term “ESC – “. This denotes roles specific to Empire State University and are the roles most likely to interact with your course.
Select the roles starting with “ESC – “ that you wish to filter the page for. Only individuals with those roles who accessed your course will now be listed on the time line. Note that some roles will indicate no access.
If you wish to export a view of the number of access events to a standalone file, you can choose either the “Export to XLSX” or “Export to CSV” options at the top of the page.