Navigate 3.1.4 LMS Reporting

The analytics tool built into schoology earned honorable mention in my last post on the tools within an LMS.   But analytics is becoming a more popular and necessary tool for driving instruction and improving learning experiences at all levels- student, teacher, course, and program.  This is not just the case for the e-learning environment; brick-and-mortar schools are also using analytics to evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher's performance and a student's learning outcome.  For this reason, analytics and grade reporting is worth a closer look.

Within schoology, my LMS of choice for this GAVS TOOL experience, both analytics and gradebook are built-in features.  The grade reporting feature has many options for customization, including the creation of categories, built-in rubrics, and gradebook exporting.  The gradebook in schoology also allows for the organization into grading periods, categories, and due dates of assignments.  Teachers can also click on the members tab on the sidebar to organize members into grading groups.  Beyond this, it was difficult to discern the various levels the gradebook could be broken down to because I do not have any students enrolled in the course.

The actual analytics feature has many more bells & whistles regarding levels and student performance.  The course, user, discussions, and links levels are the basic "click" analytics.  In other words, showing how many visits to the course page and duration of time spent by students, etc.  The element within analytics that is impressive is the assignments level.  I especially like category breakdown and how students performed on the different assignments.  To me, this is the most valuable and useful level because it provides insight to student mastery of content and standards and also highlights concepts that need remediation.

 

With only two posts remaining in my Navigation category for the GAVS TOOL experience, I have come to appreciate the role and functionality of the LMS in a virtual classroom.  Check back tomorrow for my final two posts on Learning Management Systems: Tools for Deciding on an LMS & Trend Impact!