Blackboard Home
Blackboard Home provides you with overall metrics for storage, user activity, site health, and usage for your institution’s instances of Learn. You can use Blackboard Home’s information to better understand and optimize how your institution uses Learn. You can also use Blackboard Home to compare your institution’s storage usage against your contract entitlements.
The Blackboard Home feature is an LTI 1.3 application managed via DevPortal. You can activate it via the Administrator Panel. Go to the Tools and Utilities category, then select Blackboard Home. When you configure the LTI tool, make sure to select "Role in Course" under User Fields to Send.
You can’t set further limits on access. All users with “Role in Course” can use Blackboard Home. If you can’t see the application, just resynchronize the LTI Tool Providers via: Administrator Panel > LTI Tool Providers > Synchronize LTI 1.3 Tools > Submit.
Blackboard Home has five tabs:
Sites
The Sites tab lists all of your Learn instance URLs, Versions, and AWS Regions.
Insights
You can use the Insights tab to analyze overall usage trends across various user counts, login activities, course counts, and file usage throughout Learn courses.
Blackboard Home’s Insights reports provide daily usage metrics for your institution that include:
- Storage
- Users
- Logins
- Courses
Reports display peak usage over a customizable number of months. If your institution has multiple instances of Learn, you can add or remove them through the Select Learn Instances field.
Access Insights reports by selecting the Insights tab on Blackboard Home. All reports display the date and time that the data was generated.
All reports have Chart Controls options: You can select:
- Select Stack Data to turn displaying multiple instances of Learn data on or off
- Download the entire page as a PDF
- Adjust whether reports are daily or monthly through the Resolution menu
- Choose how much time is covered in the reports through the Time Picker menu
Storage Insight report
Select the Storage tab to display reports related to how your institution is using its storage space.
Storage Usage
The Storage Usage report displays a line chart of your institution’s current and peak storage. Peak storage is the highest storage usage at the time.
Select any dot on the line chart to display the exact date and storage usage.
Select the Download CSV button to download the report as a CSV.
Pie charts
You can use the Disk Usage by File Type or the File Counts by File Type pie charts to analyze how your institution is using its disc storage. Storage used by archived data is displayed, but not divided into file types.
Users Insight report
Select the Users tab to display reports for available and active users as line charts.
Both reports can be downloaded as a CSV file. Select any dot on the line chart to display the exact date and number of users.
Available Users
The Available Users report displays a line chart of your institution’s current and peak available users. Peak Available Users is the highest number of users per day across the specified timeframe.
Active Users
The Active Users report displays a line chart of your institution’s current and peak active users. Peak Active Users is the highest number of users with access to Learn at the time.
Logins Insight report
Select the Logins tab to display line charts for login trends for your institution. All reports can be downloaded as a CSV file. Reports include data for:
- Unique logins in 30, 90, and 180 day increments
- Total successful logins
- Total failed logins
- Daily sessions
- A session refers to users who have logged in and interacted with Learn. You can compare users who logged in with how many users actually used Learn.
Select any dot on the line chart to display the exact date and number of logins.
Courses tab
The Courses tab displays your institution’s number of Original, Ultra, Ultra Preview, and Undecided courses.
Courses Over Time is a line chart showing course types over time. Select any dot on the line chart to display the exact date and number of courses by type.
Active Courses is a pie chart displaying course types only for active courses.
Total Courses is a pie chart displaying course types for both active and inactive courses.
Contract Entitlements
The Contract Entitlements tab displays information about your active service contracts for Learn. There’s a line chart of the peak storage for each of your institution’s instances of Learn. By default, only one instance can be displayed at a time. Select a specific Learn instance with the selection menu.
Peak storage is the highest storage usage at the specific time. The peak storage out of the entire period is displayed above the line chart.
- Select any dot on the line chart to display the exact date and storage usage. The Contract Entitlements tab’s line chart displays storage usage by month.
- Select the Download CSV button to download the report as a CSV.
- The Chart Controls menu can be used to compare your instance’s storage usage with your contract entitlements.
- Select Show Entitlement Threshold to display your entitlement on the chart. If your institution’s peak storage exceeds your contract entitlement, you will receive a warning.
- Select Show All Production Learn Sites to display every instance of Learn for your institution.
- Select the Download PDF button to download the report as a PDF.
Health
The Health tab displays line charts measuring how well your institution’s instances of Learn are supporting users. You can only select one Learn instance at a time. Each instance displays its uptime over the past 30 days and its Apdex over the past 30 days.
All of the line charts have a time picker menu that allows you to select a preset number of days for the chart to display. You can also set a custom amount of days.
There are five line charts on the Health tab:
- Uptime – The percentage of successful synthetics checks made.
- Apdex – Application Performance Index (Apdex) is a standard managed by an open standards organization. It acts as one indicator of a satisfactory user experience by measuring response time. Both the instance’s performance and users’ bandwidth affect the Apdex. Apdex is on a scale from 0 to 1. While 0 is an unsatisfactory slow experience, a 1 loads very quickly.
- Requests Per Minute – Throughput measures how many requests this service processes per minute.
- Unique Learn Users – This displays the number of unique Learn users.
- Logins – This displays the number of times the authentication service processed a response.
Support Request
The Support Request tab displays a table of client support tickets closed within a specific period of time. You can use the time picker to select a period over the last month, 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months. You can’t access the ticket from the Support Request tab.
There are four columns you can use to adjust how many rows display per page:
- Id
- Contact Name
- Summary
- Close Date
Select the Download CSV button to download the table as a CSV file.