Faculty teaching with Bb may employ the Course Statistics package to measure student participation. The system allows us to examine participation in Content Areas, Groups, the Discussion forum, or to look at an overall measure of participation. Faculty may investigate one student, a group of students of the entire class.

One caveat, however: the Bb's method of measuring student involvement is clumsy, at best, and faculty should take Course Statistics with a grain of salt. Bb counts keyboard strokes a student makes in a given area over time, and as intersting as this measure may be it doesn't really tell us anything about how the course management system is being used a tool of learning. One student may click into the syllabus area once, print it out and memorize it, while another may click in and out of the area many times and never really read the syllabus at all. Yet a look at the statistics would suggest the second student has more interest in/knowledge of the syllabus, when in fact the reverse is true.

Perhaps the best use for course statistics is in the relative sense; one can gather an overall perspective of which students tend to use the tool more than others. Finally, at it's most elemental one may employ statistics to measure if a student has any patticipation at all; in many cases a student from whom you have not heard in quite a while will insist that s/he has been working in Bb all along, and using the Stats tool you can know one way or the other.

1. Generate Statistics

Start by getting online, logging into Bb, accessing your course and clicking into the Control Panel. Select the Course Statistics link within the Assessment content area in the center right.






As a default one may examine the overqall summary of useage
Or one may choose to focus on given areas, such as Content, Groups, or Forums. One advantage of the focussed profiles is they take less time to process

The profile can be further refined by date

Finally, the profile can cover the entire class (All Users) or individual students:





2. Review Statistics Results

Once the report is generated you are shunted to a page of results. Right off one may choose to change the filter (that is, the areas and/or student groups being profiled), and may print or export the data. Statistical results are exported in a comma-delimited text file that can be read in MS Word or MS Excel.






	Results are displayed in a table format,
and as pie charts or bar graphs.

Click this link to obtain help: http://euphrates.wpunj.edu/bb/hd/