User Activity in Forum

Overview

The User Activity in Forums report provides an insight into the student activity within the discussion board, including accesses and number of messages. The report breaks the data down and shows the summaries for Accesses per Forum folder and also Messages (Threads) per Forum. In addition, there is also breakdown per student per forum in a matrix form.

Examples of questions that this report can answer include:

• What were the access patterns for each Forum on my vUWS site?
• How many messages per Forum were there?
• Has a particular student had any activity within a Forum?

How do I use the report?

Access the report

Access the User Activity in Forums report in your vUWS site by scrolling down to the Subject Management section in the navigation menu, then selecting Student Tracking and Subject Reports .

A list of available reports will display, the seventh report in the list should be the User Activity in Forum  report. Hover your mouse cursor over the report heading text then click on the chevron menu icon that appears and select Run.

A new page will load where you are required to input the parameters of the report including:

• Format : The output file format which will be generated for the report. Formats include PDF, HTML, Excel and Word.
• Start Date : The date that you want to examine the access data from (Must not be over 180 days from the data of the report run – see note below)
• End Date : The data that you want to access the data to.
• Users : The students within your cohort that you would like to include in the report. Note: You can leave this box without selecting any students, and it will generate data for all the students. Otherwise, you can select particular students – hold down Ctrl to select multiple students – or click on any student and press Ctrl + A to select all students.

Note: The report only retains 180 days of historical data. This means that you cannot view data older than 180 days and the selection of dates should be within the 180 days range from the date of the report run.

Once you are satisfied with you parameters, click on the Submit button down the bottom right of the page.

The report will be generated. Click on the Download Report link to access the generated PDF file. You also have the option to save the report for later using the Save to Content Collection or Download Report links.

Note : Once you are viewing the report, you will be download it to an Excel file if desired.

Using the Interface and viewing Data

The report generates a static view of the data which is broken into five sections (See screenshots below):

1. An overview of the hits/accesses per Forum
2. An overview of the messages per Forum
3. A table which contains a list of all students and the number of hits per Forum
4. A column chart and table with the total number of hits per date
5. A table per calendar month, each which contains a list of all students and the number of hits per calendar day

As this is a static report, there is no ability to interact with the data, including basic functions such as filtering it, drilling down on it, comparisons or aggregation. To enable any manipulation or further analysis of the data, it is highly recommended to download the data into an Excel format.

1. Overview of the hits per Forum

2. Overview of the messages per Forum

3. Number of hits per Forum by all Students

4. Total number of hits per date

5. Number of hits per calendar day by each student