Course Insights Program

Penn State is putting learning analytics at your fingertips with Course Insights, a powerful Canvas tool designed to provide a holistic view of the student learning experience.

Course Insights empowers instructors to explore the relationships between course engagements and learner activity to outcomes in their courses, helping them shape their pedagogical strategies, course administration, and out-of-class student support needs.  Ultimately, these views enable instructors to adapt their course, monitor the impact of those changes over time, and support a reflective teaching process.  Course Insights is available to all Penn State instructors of record for courses in LionPATH.

Course Insights makes it possible for instructors to:

  • Identify students who may be struggling in the course and when activity is below the course average
  • Use the analytic insights to support early and mid-semester progress reporting
  • Design lessons that account for your student demographic, including major, prior enrollments, and semester standing
  • Plan future lessons based on course activity patterns

As an example, the Rolling 7-day Average Activity graph, below, is an example of one of the powerful tools within Course Insights designed to help instructors understand how an individual student is engaging with online course material in comparison to their peers, generating low and zero alerts when a student’s activity is in decline or the student isn’t participating at all.

This chart displays the rolling 7-day average activity of students since the start of the course, highlighting periods of low activity, zero activity, and key actions. The blue line represents the course average rolling actions, while the red line shows individual student rolling actions. The chart also includes alerts for low activity (yellow shaded areas) and zero activity (orange shaded areas), alongside Starfish flags, referrals, kudos, and to-dos. A resolved concern is noted for attendance or login issues on September 15, 2024, by Joe Faculty. The course enrollment period ended on December 21, 2024. This visualization tracks engagement trends and identifies potential intervention points to support student success.
This chart displays the rolling 7-day average activity of students since the start of the course, highlighting periods of low activity, zero activity, and key actions. The blue line represents the course average rolling actions, while the red line shows individual student rolling actions. The chart also includes alerts for low activity (yellow shaded areas) and zero activity (orange shaded areas), alongside Starfish flags, referrals, kudos, and to-dos. A resolved concern is noted for attendance or login issues on September 15, 2024, by Joe Faculty. The course enrollment period ended on December 21, 2024. This visualization tracks engagement trends and identifies potential intervention points to support student success.

Real-time activity warnings and alerts are vital because they allow the instructor to engage in proactive support and interventions before critical points in the semester for their students.  The context an instructor brings, along with their knowledge of the course delivery and students is crucial in using this data to help support students effectively.

Get Started!

Ready to unlock insights for your course? Learn more about Course Insights or visit the Course Insights Resource Hub to incorporate Course Insights into your Canvas courses.

Training Available

Units interested in remote or in-person training can contact the Data Empowered Learning team at delteam@psu.edu