Monitoring Student engagement

[cooper549]

Hi all,

 

With all the recent announcements about student home learning and such, I have been tasked with finding a way to track student engagement with online learning and such. We use Microsoft O365 and Teams as the main platforms.

 

Simply, we would like an accurate report of those who have not logged in within a defined date period. previously we have made this report ourselves from the reports in the admin dashboard and logs within the azure dashboard, as we have found them to be somewhat unreliable as students have appeared on them occasionally, who have been engaging with teachers.

 

A while back I had seen something potentially along the lines of advanced reporting for this type of thing, but can no longer find the original link or article I read about this, but I do remember it was more specifically aimed at those who have E5/A5 licenses within Office365, and I don't want to go down this line and spend a ton of money on licenses that might not give me what I need.

 

Has anyone else been asked for this type of information, as its coming from our deputy head as a method of safeguarding to ensure kids are logging in and continuing to engage rather than just being left aside and not being noticed.

 

Thanks

Adam

[mdrabble]

If using Teams, you can ask staff to use an add on app called Insight.

 

It gives you some stats about student activity such as file usages, logon times etc.

 

Have a look here - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/educator-s-guide-to-insights-in-microsoft-teams-27b56255-90c0-47aa-bac3-1c9f50157181

Edited January 2, 2021 by mdrabble

[cooper549]

We had looked at the insight app you can add to each team, which does provide what we want. But relies on teaching staff to feed back the data which most won't do. Nor do SLT want to give them any additional work in providing this feedback, despite this possibly being the only method of doing so.

 

It would be brilliant if they could provide a more detailed dashboard that essentially provides the Insight tab in the admin centre for the whole school, which can be filtered and such as necessary to provide the reports as needed, but they seem to insist on giving it to the lowest level of user and not the ones who seemingly get asked for the information.

 

Again, I know some reports are available in the security and compliance centre, but these also don't seem to differentiate whether a user is just logged into a mobile app or whether they are actively engaging in teams.

[mavhc]

We had looked at the insight app you can add to each team, which does provide what we want. But relies on teaching staff to feed back the data which most won't do. Nor do SLT want to give them any additional work in providing this feedback, despite this possibly being the only method of doing so.

 

What do they do about monitoring engagement when physically present? An AI camera system to track eyeballs?

 

Surely they're marking work and that data is easy to collate

[AmandaG]

We're trying out Insights to log even when they just log into the remote lesson - without any other activity. So as a register basically. However, it's not showing present students who are showing as participants in the lesson when you join it. Is this a time lag? Or do we need to do anything in settings?

[HPlum78]

I thought I saw that MS had added some educational API endpoints that you can register in your tenant and then use some graph calls to build a picture of your user engagement and such likes?

 

In fact i will Google that for you:

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/education-overview?view=graph-rest-1.0

 

Don't know the entire ins and outs but it's a starter for 10...

Edited January 7, 2021 by HPlum78

[AmandaG]

HPlum78 - thank you. I'll have a look at that. Insights shows meeting attendance beautifully the day after - just not 'live' so to speak. We think we may have a way round it by asking students when they join the meeting to put a short greeting on chat. Even if it's a thumbs up - it will then register as 'activity' and will show as live data.

[HPlum78]

Just had a quick look and can pump out to JSON and use PowerBI to consume the files from there you can use a dashboard to fluff the data in to something nice.

[cooper549]

This all sounds pretty promising, and looks like something I might start having a look at myself, having never used graph at all to be honest so it'll be a nice time to learn something new.

 

One thing I also found which is tucked away in the teams settings which I have looked at before and forgotten about, but in the teams admin centre, you can pin the insights app to the side bar for everyone. This then gives an list view of a teachers classes including basic stats on engagement and activity, No sooner had I done this, and most staff are now surprisingly far more involved and just want this as it's now at their fingertips somewhat instantly rather than a report we generate which we seem to have to wait 2 days for the data to be fully available in the admin centre.

 

This just goes to show that, what some people say they want and what they actually need is very, very different.

[mavhc]

One thing I also found which is tucked away in the teams settings which I have looked at before and forgotten about, but in the teams admin centre, you can pin the insights app to the side bar for everyone.

 

How do you do this?

[Mako]

We are one of the dinosaurs that still use a VLE.

 

However, it has come up absolute trumps in light of the pandemic. Student engagement has been something that's been discussed at management level for a while, and this term the guidance is that staff set a "homework task" for each day, and students must tick this as completed (in our VLE it's a simple yes/no task). This counts as their engagement for the day on a most basic level, as it shows they are at least logging into the platform and responding.

 

Students who have not engaged are fed back to the pastoral team, and calls home are made.

 

If they are "engaging" but not completing the work set then that is for the teacher to chase up.

 

I know that doesn't help with your Teams etc, but that's my 2p.

[cooper549]

In the teams admin centre, Under 'Teams Apps' > 'Setup Policies'

 

Create a new policy for your staff and then add the insight app to the list. I found I had to move it up the list in order for it to show all the time as it was hidden under files at first.

 

Save your policy and add to staff members as required, annoyingly you can't assign it to a group like meeting policies, but you could PowerShell it to multiple users if needed once its setup.

 

The last little caveat is that it doesn't appear to show all the classes for us and I'm yet to figure out why, as we have some faculty leaders who are owners of quiet a few teams, yet only a handful are showing (I counted 14, so its not like a hard limit of 10). So I'm not sure if they have to add it to the team first in order for it to show in this list, more searching/testing is required.

 

Alternatively, I believe you can just add it to the org default, but depending on if you have app policies in place, the tab could show for students. However, I don't believe it gives them any information as they are not owners of any teams, although I probably wouldn't recommend this way, its just a very quick and dirty way to get it to appear.

[bknaggs]

Alternatively, I believe you can just add it to the org default, but depending on if you have app policies in place, the tab could show for students.

 

I read something in a Microsoft doc that said Insights will only apply to a Teams user with a Faculty license and not a Student license so adding it to the default policy is an easier way to go.