This article demonstrates how you can use the Forum Summary and Forum Statistics reports to better monitor your forum activities.
Forums are a great way to build engagement in your online courses; however, they can be challenging to monitor especially if you have multiple forums in different courses.
Here are a few common client requests:
- How can I see who has posted in the past week?
- How can I know when my learners are posting?
- How can I gauge the rate of participation in each forum?
With our out-of-the-box reports, you can easily manage your forums from one central place. Here's a breakdown of two of our most popular reports.
- Forum Summary
- Forum Statistics
1. Forum Summary
Many teachers are looking for a way to monitor and manage their forums from a single place. They want to be able to see who's posted in the last week, for example, so they can go in and grade the posts. If you are teaching multiple courses, each with multiple forums, this can be a lot of clicking.
The Forum Summary report offers a quick relief for this problem as you can quickly see who has posted in the past week and then easily go to that forum to grade it or reply.
Here I have filtered the report for one course, and to show results in the past 3 days:
You can set the filters to match your cadence for monitoring the forums. Here I've set it to show everything for the past three days:
You can also filter this report for: student name, course name, forum name, post subject, and post created date.
Report Security
The Forum Summary report is secured for course managers, meaning that teachers will only see results for their courses and the students enrolled in their courses.
Making Changes to the Report
If you want to make changes to to columns or add new filters, you can use the Ad Hoc View: Detailed Forum Table View
Hyperlinking
Our Support team can hyperlink the reports for you so that you can click on the report and go directly to the course or, even better, directly to the forum.
2. Forum Statistics
If you are looking for a bit more detail in the report, specifically for how many times a learner has posted, then you'll want to use the Forum Statistics report.
Here, I'm monitoring the progress of a specific forum activity that I want to grade, but I also want to make sure that students have posted the required amount (3 times) before I give a full grade.
I can use the search field in the filter to find the name of the specific forum:
Then I'll see who has posted as well as the number of posts, replies, and reads for this particular forum:
I can also filter this report by student name, course name, course category, forum name, and post created date.
Finally, you can use the sort feature to see which learners have posted or replied the most. Simply click on the column you want to sort, then click on the arrow for your preferred sorting order:
This would be a great option to see which forums perform the best--or the least!--in each course or across a whole course category.
Report Security
The Forum Summary report is secured for course managers, meaning that teachers will only see results for their courses and the students enrolled in their courses.
Making Changes to the Report
If you want to make changes to to columns or add new filters, you can use the Ad Hoc View: Forum Statistics Crosstab View.