You can access data about the individuals who are enrolled in your course at any time after you create the course.
To supplement the learner data that is available from the Instructor Dashboard, you can use the charts and reports that are available from edX Insights. With Insights, you can review demographic and geographic distributions for enrolled learners. You can also monitor learner activity and review the number of learners who, each week, interacted with your course. For more information, see Using edX Insights.
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 team members with the Admin or Staff role for the learners 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.
From the Instructor Dashboard, you can download data about the individuals who are currently enrolled in your course in a .csv (comma-separated values) file. For courses that have fewer than 200 learners enrolled, you can also view data for enrolled learners on the Instructor Dashboard.
For information about course enrollment, see Enrollment.
When learners create, or register, their user accounts, they select a public username and supply their full names and email addresses. Learners also have the option to provide personal demographic information, including highest level of education completed, gender, year of birth, and preferred language. Because this information is optional, not all of the learners who are enrolled in your course provide it.
After learners create an account, they can enroll in as many individual courses as they choose.
As a result, you might want to download learner data periodically to gain an understanding of how the learner population changes over time.
The student profile report includes a row for each enrolled learner or course team member and the following columns.
The descriptions of columns in the following table apply to edx.org. Required or optional fields shown to learners during registration and available for editing in Account Settings might vary for Open edX sites.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| id | The user account ID number that the system assigns to each registrant. |
| username | The public username entered by the learner. Usernames are required and cannot be changed. |
| name | The full name entered by the learner. A name is required. Learners can update this value on the Account Settings page. |
| The email address entered by the learner. An email address is required. Learners can update this value on the Account Settings page. | |
| language | This column is included for backward compatibility only. This data is no longer collected during account creation. The selection that a learner makes for language on the Account Settings page is not included in this report. |
| location | This column is included for backward compatibility only. The selection that a learner makes for Country during registration or for Country or Region on the Account Settings page is displayed in the “country” column of this report. |
| year_of_birth | This value is optional and can be updated on the Account Settings page. |
| gender | This value is optional and can be updated on the Account Settings page. |
| level_of_education | This value is optional and can be updated on the Account Settings page. For a list of the possible values, see the description of the Columns in the auth_userprofile Table table’s level_of_education column in the EdX Research Guide. |
| mailing_address | No longer collected during registration. Previously, this value was optional and was supplied only at registration. |
| goals | This value is optional and is supplied only at registration. |
| cohort | This column is included only if the course has cohorts enabled. For
courses that include learner cohorts, shows the name of the cohort group
that is assigned to the learner. If a learner is not assigned to a
cohort, the value is [unassigned]. |
| team | This column is included only if the course has teams enabled. For courses
that include teams, shows the name of the team that the learner belongs
to. If a learner has not joined a team, the value is [unavailable]. |
| city | Data for this column is not currently collected on edx.org. |
| country | Learners are required to specify Country during registration, and can update this value on the Account Settings page. |
You can download a report of learner data to gain more information about the individuals who are enrolled in your course. For courses with fewer than 200 learners enrolled, you also have the option to view learner data on the Instructor Dashboard.
To download learner data, follow these steps.
View the live version of your course.
Select Instructor, and then select Data Download.
To download data about enrolled learners in a .csv file, select Download profile information as a CSV.
A status message indicates that report generation is in progress. The number of learners enrolled in your course, and whether your course has the cohort feature enabled, affect how long this process takes. 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.
To open or save a student profile report, select the
{course_id}_student_profile_info_{date}.csv file name at the bottom of
the page.
All learner-supplied data is included in this file without truncation. For more information, see Columns in the Student Profile Report.
To view learner data, follow these steps.
Note
This option is available only for courses with an enrollment of less than 200.
View the live version of your course.
Select Instructor, and then select Data Download.
To display data about enrolled learners, select List enrolled students’ profile information.
A table of profile data displays, with one row for each enrolled learner. Longer values, such as goals, are truncated. For more information, see Columns in the Student Profile Report.
Some of the tools that are available for use with the edX platform, including external graders and surveys, work with anonymized learner 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, follow these steps.
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 learner at registration and its corresponding edX-wide anonymized user ID and course specific anonymized user ID. Values are included for every learner who ever enrolled for your course.
To research and deanonymize learner data, you can use this file together with
the {course_id}_student_profile_info_{date}.csv file of learner data or the
{course_id}_grade_report_{date}.csv file of grades.
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).
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.
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. |
| 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. |
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.
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.