Introduction:
Completion (Click) Tracking in Brightspace lets instructors monitor which content items students have accessed. It’s a useful tool for identifying which materials are engaging students and which may need improvement.
This step-by-step guide will show you how to use click tracking to evaluate content engagement and help students stay on track by showing their progress through the course.
Step-by-Step Instructions:
Note: Instructors must wait until the course start date to monitor content completion and participation. The completion summary does not display any learners who are enrolled before the course begins. Once the start date has passed, the summary updates automatically to include enrolled learners.
Use completion tracking to monitor learners' progress throughout your course in the New Content Experience. Instructors can set topic completion criteria as Automatic or Manual on the Edit page for the following content types:
- LTI links
- Web links, including Google Drive, MS OneDrive, and Capture
- Course files, including media and HTML files
- SCORM content, including imported, content service, and LOR
- LOR links, including URLs and files
Set Completion Tracking for an Individual Content Item or Module
Content goes here
- 1. Log into Brightspace and access your course.
- [a] Click on Content on the navigation bar
- [b] Select a module folder and content type
- [c] Click on the three dots and select Edit from the drop-down menu
- 2. Once on the editing dashboard, navigate to the left menu and select Completion to expand the setting options:
- Required: Automatic—Topics will be automatically marked as complete when the student completes the module tasks, such as post in a discussion or submit a quiz.
- Required: Manual—Students must manually select a checkbox next to the course component to mark the item as complete.
- Not Required—No completion tracking will be monitored for the module. (if applicable)
-
NOTE: The same applies to creating new content items; when creating, the Completion tab should also be available, see below.
- 3. Click on Save & Close
- You will now see a checkmark next to all content items within the module indicating that completion tracking is enabled.
- Or, if manual, you will be given an option to Mark as Complete
View a Completion Summary - Track Student Activity
Use completion tracking to monitor learners' progress throughout your course.
- 1. Going back to the Content area,
- Click on the topic you want to view completion tracking results for.
- 2. In the Completion Summary tab, do any of the following:
- To view all learners' results for the topic, click All.
- To view all learners who have completed the topic, click Completed.
- To view all learners who have not completed the topic, click Incomplete.
Troubleshooting Tips:
WARNING! Looking at click tracking data in aggregate can be useful for instructors evaluating their own teaching. However, click tracking data can be unreliable at the individual user level and should never be used as a way to police or evaluate students. Consider these scenarios:
- • A student has trouble with their wifi, and so a classmate sends them PDFs of the reading. Click tracking will tell you they never clicked on the link when in fact they did the reading carefully as instructed.
- • A student downloads all the documents in the course at the beginning of the semester in bulk, but click tracking will have no way of communicating that information. It will just indicate that the student did not select the link.
- • Another student clicked on all the links, but did not read carefully or process the content. Click tracking can’t tell you to what degree a student engaged with the content or whether they understand what they read.
- • A student clicks on a link within a course and completes the activity, but, for reasons we cannot ascertain, that click was not registered in D2L Brightspace. To both the student and the instructor, it may look like the student never clicked on the link.
-
- ADDITIONALLY
- • External Learning Tools, such as Zoom, are not included in click tracking. Click tracking only tracks tools and resources that are part of Brightspace’s tools.
- • The Completion accordion does not appear if you have selected a module to edit; it is not possible to manually complete an entire module.
- • Manual completion is not available for assessable activities that are automatically updated based on the tool, such as assignments, discussions, and quizzes, or Brightspace tool topics such as checklists, surveys, news items, and calendar events.
- • The Set as Required option is the default for all content topics.
- • You can only view a Completion Summary for courses with fewer than 1000 learners enrolled.
Additional Resources: