Best practices: Four ways to best utilize Joule Reports

Open LMS created Joule Reports to supplement Moodle™ reports. As you read in one of our previous posts Moodle™ has great reporting functionality with its built-in reports to assist you during your daily facilitation tasks. However Moodle™ reports are somewhat limited because there are only five types of course reports with restricted amounts of filters. Now Open LMS has more than 50 Joule Reports available for students teachers and site administrators.

Joule Reports enable you to track individual student performance specific learning activities and course-wide trends. They are fast and easy to use because there is no need to refresh your page in between viewing the various reports. You can easily navigate from report to report and the information updates automatically saving you precious time and clicks. To view these reports click Joule Reports in the Settings block within Course Administration.

The four categories of Joule Reports

Within each of the categories you can use reports and filters that will assist you in finding the information you want to know. Here are the four categories of reports available to instructors:

• Course Reports: Provide simple views of student engagement within course activities
• Correlation Reports: Compare grades in the course to the level of engagement against activities
• Exception Reports: Display information regarding students who are not interacting with the course activities
• Learner View Reports: View information as if you are a student

Four tips for using Joule Reports

I am sure at this point you are curious to explore these fantastic reports but before you start using them let me share with you four tips for taking advantage of Joule Reports:

1. Apply sticky filters: When you select criteria for a filter (e.g. a certain date range) it will “stick” in all reports. This means that you don’t have to filter by the criteria when jumping from report to report. This will save you time when viewing different types of reports because there will be no need to select the data range again once you view another report. Don’t forget to update the filter and select new dates when you want to look for another date range.
2. Use reports for grading: There are several ways to grade activities in Joule but in my opinion the most efficient method is via the Needs Grading report which is located in the Course Reports category. This report allows you to easily find activities that students have submitted but have not yet been graded by you. The generated report provides a list with the name of the activity the name of the participant when the activity was submitted and a link for grading the submission.
3. See information in a graphical format: I am a firm believer that a picture is worth a thousand words and when using the Joule’s Correlation Reports you cannot only see information in tables but also select them to be displayed in graphs. These graphs allow you to have a visual representation of how students are interacting with your course. For example you can easily analyze the effectiveness of course activities by looking at a graph that plots student engagement versus activity grade.
4. Message students instantly: Joule allows you to contact one or multiple students directly from the Course and Exception Reports. As you get familiar generating these types of reports you will find the need to communicate with students about their course behavior. It could be a positive reinforcement for completing a set of activities or it can be a warning message saying they need to complete a quiz. No matter the reason you will find this functionality useful because it allows you to contact students instantly.

If you are still curious to learn more about Joule Reports I recommend that you attend our webinar Making Moodle™ and Joule Reports Work for You. This training offer has been designed to instruct instructors and administrators on how to use reports to gather data from their Joule site. During the session participants learn about Moodle™ and Joule Reports and understand how they work by interacting with the different types of reports. In addition they will learn how Joule allows site administrators to create their own reports using SQL queries.

Sincerely,

~Marcelo