Learner Progression & Personalized Experience
Test and Discussion events included in the Activity Accumulator and synthetic events clean-up – 3900.95
Blackboard Learn SaaS
Ultra Experience and Original Experience
Ultra Course View and Original Course View
Impact: Administrators
Administrators and faculty need to review user activity. This user activity helps inform decisions in academic disputes and aids in troubleshooting.
Administrators can now view more granular events for what students did on assessments and discussions in the “activity_accumulator” table.
New events are saved in the “event_type” column.
| Event name | Rule |
|---|---|
| ASSESSMENT_SUBMIT | A student submits a test or an assignment |
| ASSESSMENT_DRAFT | A student saves a draft on a test or an assignment |
| DISCUSSION_RESPONSE | A student posts a response on a discussion |
| DISCUSSION_REPLY | A student posts a reply on a discussion |
| DISCUSSION_DRAFT | A student saves a draft in a reply or response to a discussion |
| DISCUSSION_EDIT | A student edits a reply or response to a discussion |
Note: The “activity_accumulator” includes only submissions the student makes. Auto submissions made by the system are not yet included.
Image 1: Query results of user interactions in a course including discussion and assessment events in the “activity_accumulator” table
We also cleaned up the “activity_accumulator” table to prevent the generation of synthetic and duplicate events. This makes student activity review simpler and more transparent.
- Indirect user interactions may generate synthetic events. For example, a student might access a page where content was displayed without accessing content itself might generate a synthetic event. These synthetic events could lead to confusion, making it difficult to differentiate real user interactions and clutter databases. Now, no synthetic events are generated.
- Duplicated events were generated with a single user interaction. This could give the impression a user was more active than they were. Now, each user interaction registers a single event.
- When opening a folder, learning module, or other container, “CONTENT_ACCESS” events were registered for all items inside the container. Now, only the access for the container is registered.
Behaviors you can expect on existing events:
- “COURSE_ACCESS” events are generated only when a user accesses the course.
- “CONTENT_ACCESS” events are generated only when a user accesses that course content. This applies for all course content items: documents, assessments, discussions, journals, LTI activities, SCORM packages, etc.
As before, the “activity_accumulator” table can receive requests from Course Content public APIs. If you’re using the following API endpoints, take into account these new events and cleanup:
- GET /learn/api/public/v1/courses/{courseld}/contents
- GET /learn/api/public/v1/courses/{courseld}/contents/{contentld}
- GET /learn/api/public/v1/courses/{courseld}/contents/{contentld}/children
Key considerations:
- These changes apply to new events. Historic events will remain the same.
- The activity_accumulator table registers events of all users no matter the role. These changes apply to students and any other role that made these interactions.
- User actions made in mobile app are also included in the “activity_accumulator” table.
For administrators: To track user interactions in the Activity Accumulator table this feature needs to be activated. Go to Tools and Utilities in the administrator panel. Select System Reporting, then Auto-Reporting options. Select Yes in the event tracking field. The default state is on.