Administrators track system usage through System Reports. Statistics provide information about the number of courses, users, overall usage, and cumulative hits. Reports may also be exported and viewed as a text file or in a spreadsheet program.
The Event Tracking option must be set to Yes on the Auto-Reporting Options page before Statistics will be recorded.
To ensure system performance, the database only stores data for the previous 180 days. Therefore, activity that occurred more than 180 days before running the report will not be included in the report. To increase the number of days that data is stored, please contact Blackboard Support.
Run statistics reports
- On the Administrator Panel, under Tool and Utilities, select System Reporting.
- Select Statistics Reports.
- Select the report to run by selecting Run in the report's menu. The following reports are available:
- Course Activity Overview displays overall activity within a single course, sorted by student and date. Data includes the total and average time spent per active student and the total amount and type of activity each student had in the course. Optionally, you can filter the report by one or more groups. Only students who are members of the selected groups are included in report results.
- Session Activity Overview displays detailed information about individual login sessions and the activities that occurred in each session. The Excel report includes information on each user's time spent in the system and in their courses during a session, as well as users who did not access the system or certain courses at all. For large institutions with lots of user activity, this will generate significant amounts of data. Excel can only handle files up to 2GB or sometimes more depending on the version. In these circumstances, the report should be run with shorter date range parameters.
- Debug Runtime Environment provides feedback on the Blackboard Learn runtime environment.
- Overall Summary of Usage displays a summary of overall Blackboard Learn system usage.
- Site Page Views displays the average number of page views and course page views per month and per day.
- Tracking Reports displays detailed statistics for courses and organizations.
- User Activity Overview displays overall system and course activity for all users, including average logins and time spent, and statistics on user activity by course.
- User Statistics displays the average number of total users, students, and instructors per month and per day.
The Session Activity Overview report is not available in Learn version 9.1 Q4 2016 and later.
To see a report of an individual user's activity across courses, run the User Activity Overview Report, available in the menu next to a username in the Users area of the Admin Panel.
The Run Reports page displays summary information about the report, including name, description, and the elapsed time of the last run. The Report Specifications section offers the following options:
- Select Format: Choose an output format for the report. PDF (default), HTML, Excel, and Word are the available choices. Note that charts can't be displayed in Excel format; if charts are required, run them in PDF or HTML format.
- Select a Start Date: (Required) Select a beginning date for the data to be analyzed and reported.
- Select an End Date: (Required) Select an end date for the data to be analyzed and reported.
If you want to include data from today's date, select the end date for tomorrow. Statistics are returned based on a day that begins at midnight and ends at 11:59 PM. Statistics for the present day won't be accurate up to the minute of the request. There will be a short time delay based on the time it takes the database to record the activity.
After a report is run successfully, you can choose to save it to the Content Collection, download the report, or run a new report using different reporting criteria.
