.. _Overview:

#############
Overview
#############

EdX Insights makes information about courses available to course team members
who have the Staff or Admin role. EdX Insights provides these
course team members with data about student activity, background, and
performance throughout the course. Using edX Insights can help you monitor how
students are doing, and validate the choices you made in designing your
course. It can also help you re-evaluate choices and inform efforts to improve
your course and the experience of your learners.

Putting the data provided by edX Insights to work involves:

* Evaluating reported data against your expectations and hypotheses.

* Understanding the context of the course run: the environmental factors and
  choices that make each run unique.

* Deciding whether action is called for.

* Selecting the action to take, and when.
  
EdX Insights includes a brief description for each reported value. To see these
descriptions, move your cursor over the "i" information icons that appear at
top right of each chart or metric.

.. image:: images/tip_on_mouseover.png
 :alt: The Active Students Last Week metric with the tooltip "Students who
       visited at least one page in the course content" showing.

This guide is intended to offer more complete information about the data that
edX Insights presents.

* For information about the computation of the values that are reported, see 
  the :ref:`Reference` chapter. For a reference to the data that edX collects 
  and stores, see the `edX Research Guide`_.

* For an introduction to the graphs, metrics, and reports that you can access 
  in edX Insights, see the following chapters.

 * :ref:`Enrollment_Activity` 

 * :ref:`Enrollment_Geography`

 * :ref:`Enrollment_Demographics`

 * :ref:`Engagement_Content`

 * :ref:`Engagement_Video`
 
 * :ref:`Performance_Graded`
 
 * :ref:`Performance_Ungraded`

Each of these chapters contains a section for anecdotal "Analytics in Action".
These sections showcase how collected data can reveal information about
courses and students, and how course teams might react to the information.

You are invited to share your experiences using edX Insights. Contact the edX
documentation team at `docs@edx.org`_.

.. *********************************
.. Analytics in Action: An Example
.. *********************************

.. if this story is ever included it must be anonymized per Mark H.

.. ==================================================
.. Measuring the Effectiveness of Bulk Email
.. ==================================================

.. The first time that Professor Ana Bell ran 6.00.1x for MITx, she noticed that students had a real pain point around homework deadlines. Although reminders were posted in three different parts of the course content, students just didn't convert the published due date and time from UTC to their local time zones. After the first assignment due date for the Fall 2013 run, Professor Bell fielded almost 80 individual discussion posts from students who had experienced some time zone confusion.

.. For the Spring 2014 run of the course, Professor Bell decided to use the bulk email feature on the Instructor Dashboard to send reminders to her students. She sent a message a few hours before every course deadline, and even included a link to a UTC conversion website. After the first assignment, she noticed a significant decrease in the number of discussion posts relating to misunderstood deadlines, down to about 20.

.. Beyond the approximate data that she got from comparing discussion posts, Professor Bell also compared the completion rates for the two runs. From a completion rate of about 6% for the Fall 2013 run of 6.00.1x, the completion rate went up to 7% in Spring 2014. While other variables may have contributed to this increase, Professor Bell believes that the "ongoing heartbeat” of her weekly messages acted not only to solve the specific problem of missed deadlines, but also as a more general motivator, getting students to keep visiting the course and looking at the material.

.. Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python



.. _edX Research Guide: http://edx.readthedocs.org/projects/devdata/en/latest/
.. _docs@edx.org: docs@edx.org
