Quercus Data Insights: A New Dashboard Tool to Analyze Student Activity

Facilitators:  
Alan da Silveira Fleck, Data Analyst, Learning Analytics, Office of the Vice-Provost, Innovations in Undergraduate Education 
William Heikoop, Coordinator, Digital Learning Innovation 
Cora McCloy, Faculty Liaison Coordinator, SoTL, CTSI 
Maryam Shafiei, Faculty Liaison, Technology, CTSI/ARC 
Victoria Sheldon, Faculty Liaison Coordinator, Generative AI Pedagogies, CTSI 

The University’s learning analytics initiative has developed a series of dashboards designed to visualize course-level student activity data within Quercus. These visualizations serve as a valuable resource for instructors, enabling them to gain deeper insights into student engagement and behaviour, such as: 

• Identifying peak student activity times and engagement patterns. 
• Tracking when course elements are first accessed or reviewed. 
• Analyzing pre-class preparation by monitoring engagement with readings. 
• Comparing engagement levels across different time frames. 
• Identifying past student activity patterns that can inform future course design. 

In this introductory workshop, participants will learn about: 

• The scope and goals of Quercus Data Insights. 
• Dashboard functionalities and capabilities. 
• Formulating meaningful questions based on student activity data. 
• Accessing additional supporting resources. 
• Complementing dashboard insights with information available in Quercus New Analytics 

Workshop participants will gain access to the Quercus Data Insights dashboard, which contains data from all courses where they were instructors over the past years (data available from September 2022 to April 2025).