16.1. Learner 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 learner data that is available from the instructor dashboard in the LMS, 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.

16.1.1. 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 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.

16.1.2. Accessing Learner Data

In the LMS, 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 more information, see Download or View Learner Data.

For information about course enrollment, see Enrollment.

16.1.2.1. About Learner-Reported Data

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.

  • The learner data that is available from the instructor dashboard reflects the set of live, current enrollments. Data for the course team, wha are also enrolled in the course, is included.
  • Learners can enroll in your course throughout the defined enrollment period, and they can unenroll from a course at any time.
  • Learners can update their personal information at any time on the Account Settings page.

As a result, you might want to download learner data periodically to gain an understanding of how the learner population changes over time.

16.1.2.2. Columns in the Student Profile Report

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.
email 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 data:auth_userprofile 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.
enrollment_mode Indicates the enrollment track that the learner is enrolled in, such as “audit” or “verified”.
verification_status

Indicates whether learners who are enrolled in course tracks that require ID verification have successfully verified their identities to edX by submitting an official photo ID via webcam. The value in this column is “N/A” for learners enrolled in course tracks that do not require ID verification.

A value of “Not ID Verified” in this column indicates that the learner is enrolled in a course track that requires ID verification (such as “verified”) but she has not attempted ID verification, or the ID verification has failed or expired.

A value of “ID Verified” indicates that the learner is enrolled in a course track that requires ID verification, and her ID verification is current and valid.

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.

16.1.2.3. Download or View Learner Data

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.

16.1.2.3.1. Download Learner Data

To download learner data, follow these steps.

  1. View the live version of your course.

  2. Select Instructor, and then select Data Download.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

16.1.2.3.2. View Learner Data

To view learner 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. Select Instructor, and then select Data Download.

  3. 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.

16.1.3. Accessing Anonymized Learner IDs

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.

  1. View the live version of your course.
  2. Select Instructor, and then select Data Download.
  3. Select 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 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.

16.1.4. 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).

16.1.4.1. Understanding the Learner Engagement Report

16.1.4.1.1. 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 Submit, 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 Adding Exercises and Tools.

16.1.4.1.2. 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 Submit to submit an answer.
Total Problem Attempts The number of times the learner selected Submit 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.

16.1.4.2. 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 in the LMS from the instructor dashboard.

To download a learner engagement report, follow these steps.

  1. View the live version of your course.
  2. Select Instructor, then select Data Download.
  3. At the bottom of the page, select 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.