11.10. Student Data

You can access data about the individuals who are enrolled in your course at any time after you create the course.

To supplement the student data available from the Instructor Dashboard, you can use the charts and reports that are available from edX Insights. With Insights, you can monitor student activity and review the number of students who, each week, interacted with your course. For more information, see Using edX Insights.

11.10.1. Guidance for Working with Personal Information

The information that edX collects from site registrants includes personal information that can be used to identify, contact, and locate individuals. This information is available to course authors for the students who are enrolled in their courses.

Members of the course team should follow the policies established by their organizations and comply with the legal requirements of their locales to prevent public distribution or misuse of this information.

11.10.2. Accessing Student Data

You can download data about the students who are currently enrolled in your course in a CSV (comma-separated values) file. For courses that have fewer than 200 students enrolled, you can also view data for enrolled students on the Instructor Dashboard.

For information about course enrollment, see Enrollment.

11.10.2.1. Student-Reported Data

When students register with edX, they select a public username and supply information about themselves. Most of this information is optional, so not all of the students who are enrolled in your course provide it.

Fields that collect student information during registration

Students then enroll in as many individual courses as they choose, which enrolls them in each selected course.

You can access this self-reported information for all of the students who are enrolled in your course.

  • username
  • name
  • email
  • year_of_birth
  • gender
  • level_of_education. For more information about the reported values, see auth_userprofile.level_of_education column in the edX Research Guide.
  • mailing_address
  • goals

The student data that is available to course team members always reflects the set of live, current enrollments. Students can enroll in your course throughout the defined enrollment period, and they can unenroll from a course at any time. Students can also change their email addresses and full names at any time. As a result, you may want to download student data periodically to gain insights into how the student population changes over time.

Note

In the future, edX may also request that students select a language and location. This data is not collected at this time.

11.10.2.2. Download or View Student Data

You can download a report of student data to learn about the individuals who are enrolled in your course. In addition to the self-reported data collected at registration, this report includes the user account ID numbers that edX assigns to each registrant. For courses that include student cohorts, this report includes the cohort group that is assigned to each student.

When you choose to download student data, a process starts on the edX servers. The number of students enrolled in your course, and whether your course has the cohort feature enabled, affect how long this process takes. You can download a report of student profile information in a CSV (comma-separated values) file after the process is complete.

For courses with fewer than 200 students enrolled, you also have the option to view student data on the Instructor Dashboard.

Note

In addition to the data for enrolled students, data for the course team is included in the file or display.

To download student data, follow these steps.

  1. View the live version of your course.
  2. Click Instructor, then click Data Download.
  3. To download data about enrolled students in a CSV file, click Download profile information as a CSV.

A status message indicates that report generation is in progress. This process can take some time to complete, but you can navigate away from this page and do other work while it runs.

To track the progress of the report process, reload the page in your browser and scroll down to the Pending Tasks section.

  1. To open or save a student data report, click the {course_id}_student_profile_info_{date}.csv file name at the bottom of the page.
All student-supplied data is included in this file without truncation.

To view student data, follow these steps.

Note

This option is available only for courses with an enrollment of less than 200.

  1. View the live version of your course.

  2. Click Instructor, then click Data Download.

  3. To display data about enrolled students, click List enrolled students’ profile information.

    A table of the student data displays, with one row for each enrolled student. Longer values, such as student goals, are truncated.

Table with columns for the collected data points and rows for each student on the Instructor Dashboard

For courses that have the cohorts feature enabled, this report also includes a Cohort column with each student’s assigned cohort group.

Note

The columns for language and location are included in this report for backward compatibility only. This data is no longer collected during student registration.

11.10.3. Accessing Anonymized Student IDs

Some of the tools that are available for use with the edX platform, including external graders and surveys, work with anonymized student data. If it becomes necessary for you to deanonymize previously anonymized data, you can download a CSV file to use for that purpose.

To download a file of assigned user IDs and anonymized user IDs:

  1. View the live version of your course.
  2. Click Instructor, then click Data Download.
  3. Click Get Student Anonymized IDs CSV.

You are prompted to open or save the {course-id}-anon-id.csv file for your course. This file contains the user ID that is assigned to each student at registration and its corresponding edX-wide anonymized user ID and course specific anonymized user ID. Values are included for every student who ever enrolled for your course.

To research and deanonymize student data, you can use this file together with the {course_id}_student_profile_info_{date}.csv file of student data or the {course_id}_grade_report_{date}.csv file of grades.

11.10.4. Using the Learner Engagement Report

With the learner engagement report, you can monitor what individual learners are doing in your course. The report contains a row for each enrolled learner, and has columns that quantify overall course activity and engagement with course problems, videos, discussions, and textbooks.

With this report, you can identify which learners are, and which are not, visiting course content. Further, you can identify the learners who are attempting problems, playing videos, participating in discussions, or viewing textbooks.

The server generates a new learner engagement report every day for the previous day’s activity. On Mondays, an additional report is generated to summarize activity during the previous week (Monday through Sunday).

11.10.4.1. Understanding the Learner Engagement Report

11.10.4.1.1. Reported Problem Types

To measure problem-related activity, the learner engagement report includes data for capa problems. That is, the report includes data for problems for which learners can select Check, including these problem types.

  • Checkboxes
  • Custom JavaScript
  • Drag and Drop
  • Dropdown
  • Math expression input
  • Multiple choice
  • Numerical input
  • Text input

The report does not include data for open response assessments or LTI components.

For more information about the problem types that you can add to courses, see Creating Exercises and Tools.

11.10.4.1.2. Report Columns

The learner engagement report .csv files contain the following columns.

Column Description
Date Included only in the daily report. The date of the reported activity.
End Date Included only in the weekly report. The last date of the report period.
Course ID The identifier for the course run.
Username The unique username for an edX account.
Email The unique email address for an edX account.
Cohort Indicates the learner’s assigned cohort. Blank if the learner is not assigned to a cohort.
Was Active Included only in the daily report. 1 for learners who visited any page (URL) in the course at least once during the reported day, 0 otherwise.
Days Active This Week Included only in the weekly report. Identifies the number of days during the week that the learner visited any page (URL) in the course.
Unique Problems Attempted The number of unique problems for which the learner selected Check to submit an answer.
Total Problem Attempts The number of times the learner selected Check to submit answers, regardless of the particular problem attempted.
Unique Problems Correct The number of unique problems for which the learner submitted a correct answer.
Unique Videos Played The number of times the learner played a video. Each video that the learner began to play is included in this count once.
Discussion Posts The number of new posts the learner contributed to the course discussions.
Discussion Responses The number of responses the learner made to posts in the course discussions.
Discussion Comments The number of comments the learner made on responses in the course discussions.
Textbook Pages Viewed The number of pages in a .pdf textbook that the learner viewed.
URL of Last Subsection Viewed The URL of the last subsection the learner visited.

11.10.4.2. Download the Learner Engagement Report

An automated process runs daily on the system server to update learner engagement data and create the daily or weekly .csv file for you to download. Links to the .csv files are available on the Instructor Dashboard.

To download a learner engagement report, follow these steps.

  1. View the live version of your course.
  2. Click Instructor, then click Data Download.
  3. At the bottom of the page, click the student_engagement_daily_{date}.csv or student_engagement_weekly_{end date}.csv file name. You might have to scroll down to find a specific file.