Best practices: Six tips for taking advantage of Joule's comparison reports

If you follow this blog you already know about the advantages of Moodle™ core reports and the enhanced Joule Reports. Open LMS Summer 2012 release included several features to assist instructors and facilitators within Joule LMS. One new feature the Comparison Report is a tremendous enhancement for those teachers who want to keep a close eye on the performance and engagement of students in their courses.

Comparison Reports is a new Joule Report category added to the existing collection of Joule Reports. Reports available in this category display data comparing user participation across course activities to overall course performance in a site category. Four types of Comparison Reports are available:

• Activities comparison: Compares the summary data of different activities within a course.
• Participants comparison: Compares the summary data of different users or cohorts within a course.
• Course summaries: Displays summary data for different courses across the site.
• Participant summaries: Displays summary data of users in courses that share a facilitator.

Teachers and site administrators can access all of these reports but the data displayed in each of them will be slightly different because those roles have different permissions in the system. Below you’ll find a few tips on how each role can take advantage of Comparison Reports.

Teachers

Tip #1: Measure the Success of your Course Activities

By running the Activities Comparison report teachers can see the average grade of each course activity and the average percentage of completion. Teachers enrolled in multiple courses can quickly generate data for other courses just by changing the course name in the drop-down menu.

Tip #2: Monitor Progress from Reports instead of the Gradebook

The Participants Comparison report gives facilitators the ability to find average grades for all activities completed by a student or cohort. The ability to see how much of the course each user already completed shown in a percentage is an added bonus. If a teacher has multiple courses a report for the other courses is easy to generate by changing the course name in the drop-down menu.

Tip #3: Monitor Student Performance across Courses

As a teacher you can run the Participant Summary report and find a summary of the course achievement of a student in all courses that you are a teacher. There is no longer a need to visit multiple courses to extract the information; everything is displayed in one page in a matter of a few clicks.

Site Administrators

Tip #1: Easily Supervise Course Performance

The Course Summary report allows the usage of a filter to compare data in all the courses present inside a site category. Use the filter to select the courses presents in top level or sub-categories and the report automatically displays the category names of the courses average grade of each enrolled student average percentage of completion and how many engagement hits and sample activities exist in each of the courses.}

Tip #2: Quickly Determine Overall Student Performance

Creating a report that displays the overall performance of a student in all enrolled courses is a feature now available in Joule. When a site administrator enters the name of a participant in the Participant Summary report filter a list with all courses the participant is enrolled in is displayed. The information rendered contains the course category the name of the course the average grade of the activities completed in the course the percentage of completion the number of engagement hits and how many activities the student visited in the course.

Tip #3: Determine Cohort Interaction

The Participant Summary report supports the generation of reports for an entire cohort in the case that cohorts are being used in the site. Site Administrators enter the name of the cohort as a filter and a list of courses for all students in that cohort is displayed. Depending on the number of students in the cohort this list can become quite extensive. An easy way to analyze that list is by exporting the results into a CSV file so it can open in software that allows management of spreadsheets.

Following these tips will lead you on a good path to take advantage of the new Comparison Reports. In order to learn more about these and other Joule Reports we recommend you attend our reports webinar Making Moodle™ and Joule Reports Work for You Take some time to explore the Joule 2 Product Manuals to find descriptive information on how to use Joule reports.

Best,

Laura Lea & Marcelo