Data Q&A

Find out more about Anthology Illuminate

Explore your institutional data by asking questions related to critical aspects of the student experience and get customizable visual answers. You can quickly identify trends and patterns in your data and easily share your insights with others. Visit the "AI Transparency Note" topic to learn more about how AI is used within Data Q&A. 

Note that Data Q&A is only available in English.

With Data Q&A you can:  

• Answer questions about the institution’s data using AI to ask questions in natural language.
• Present answers to those questions in a meaningful way using various visualization types.
• Pin visuals of frequently asked questions in personalized dashboards for quick access.
• Access advanced filtering options, forecasting, and prescriptive questions.
• Ask questions and get answers depending on the user’s institutional hierarchy and role.

What is required?

To have Data Q&A available, your Illuminate instance needs to have the following prerequisites: 

1. Adopt Institutional Authentication. 
2. Opt-in to generative AI. 
   • Sign in as a user with the Illuminate Developer role in Blackboard. 
   • Open the side panel and select Settings. 
   • Go to the Global Settings tab. 
   • Select Opt-in to generative AI capabilities. 

By default, the generative AI capabilities option is off.

3. Only users with unrestricted data access have Data Q&A available. This privilege can be managed in your settings. 
   • Sign in as a user with the Illuminate Developer role in Blackboard. 
   • Open the side panel and select Settings. 
   • Go to the License Management tab. 
   • Search for the user whose privileges you want to modify and select Edit.

• Under the Report permission dropdown, select Data Unrestricted, select Add, and then select Save.

Users with Data Restricted permission and Role-Based Access applied don’t have access to Data Q&A.

What type of questions to ask:  

Questions that help leverage great insights from your institutional data, you can ask about: 

• Student activity trends
• Student comparisons with course peers
• Student engagement with courses
• Student performance

You can also get inspiration by one of these sample questions: 

• Which students' grades are failing?
• What’s the student’s average grades in each course in comparison to their peers?
• What are the average hours spent in a course weekly per course per student?
• Which students did not access their courses in the last 3 weeks?
• Which students' activity is dropping?
• Which students have minimum engagement?
• What proportion of students have grades at or above, and below the grade boundary?
• How’s the student activity and performance in each course compared to peers?
• What’s the student’s participation rate compared to peers?
• What's the level of engagement with course content per student?

How to interact with Data Q&A: 

Select the topic

From the Data Q&A bar, use the dropdown to select the topic available that you'd like to ask about. The sample topic, Student Engagement & Performance, is already selected for you.

Enter a question

From the Data Q&A bar, enter your question to generate a custom visual answer.

Review how your question was interpreted 

Below your question, you can find a description of the visualization.

You can also go to the three dots in the right menu of the visualization and select View explanation to view a more detailed description of how the visual answer was built.

Change visual types 

After you get a custom visual answer, go to the three dot menu at the top right, select the bar chart icon, and change the visual types as many times as needed to find the most appropriate visual answer for your question.

Add your custom visual answers to a pinboard

You can pin a visual that you find useful and easily check it later in your institution’s pinboard. You can add or remove answers at any time. You can pin your favorite visuals in order to see updated data without having to ask the same question over and over again.

In the visualization’s menu at the top right, select the three dots and then the pinboard icon to pin the current visual. You can later find all your pins by selecting the pinboard icon above the question field at the top of the screen.

Change the name of the visual 

Go to one of the pinned visualizations. In the three dot menu at the top right, select Rename and enter the new title.

Export CSV

In the current visual answer or by going to your pinboards, go to the three dots menu and select Export CSV .

Give feedback

Whenever you find a visual answer helpful or unhelpful, select the Feedback button to share a thumbs up or thumbs down for the topic owners. You can provide additional details.