Teams: Use Insights to Get Data on Student Engagement

Teams - Data

Microsoft Teams is great for interacting and engaging with students but it can be a little hard to know how much they are interacting and using Teams.

Sure there are some obvious ways to check on how engaged your students are in Teams (cough, cough Assignments) but those are proxies at best.

Fortunately, Microsoft offers an excellent analytics tool that can give you a more precise and comprehensive picture of how your students

This tool is called Insights and easy to add to your classes.

Install Insights

1. Open the Team you want to install the app on

2. Click into the General Channel and then click the + button at the top to add a tab

3. Use the search query to look for Insights. It looks like this:

4. Click on the icon to install it.

5. It will ask you permission for access to the data. Click Add

6. On the next screen, toggle Post to channel off and then click Save

That’s it, the app is installed and you will now be able to see your data.

To see you data, click on the Insights tab where you see a dashboard that shows you real time data on student activity, average grades, how they are doing on turning in assignments, how long it takes you to give feedback and an overall picture of communication in the team.

The Five Categories of Data

Digital activity

The Digital Activity tile shows student Teams activity over time:

Posting and reaction to messages
Viewing and editing files
Turning in assignments

By default, the report shows data for Today. Select Specific day, 7 days, or 30 days for other time ranges.

Average grade

The Average grade tile presents the calculated average grade from all graded assignments. On the graph, each dot on the line represents a specific assignment; hover over a dot to see the grade data for that assignment.

Average grade tile selected on a Class Insights dashboard. Line graph showing two lines plotted for individual student data and class data

Only assignments that have been assigned a point value and returned back to a student with a grade will be shown in the Average grade graph.

On-time assignments

The On-time assignments tile presents the percentage of assignments that were turned in on time. In the graph, you can also see the total percentage of assignments that were late and missing (not yet turned in), as well as submission status (on time, late, or missing) for each specific assignment.

On-time assignments tile selected on Class Insights dashboard

Average time for feedback

Average time for feedback shows you the average length of time, in days, between a student submitting an assignment, and when it’s returned back to them.

The number on the tile is an average of the time for feedback across all students and assignments. On the line graph, each dot on the line represents an assignment; hover over the dot to see data for a specific assignment.

Average time for feedback tile selected on Class Insights dashboard

Communication activity

Communication activity presents data on posts, replies, and reactions in channel conversations.

Note: This data reflects only student activity, and will not include posts, replies, or reactions from teachers.

The number shown on the tile is the total number of all student posts, replies, and reactions. In the graph, you can use the dropdown menu and select options to see activity across all channels, multiple channels, or a single channel.

Conversation activity tile selected on Class Insights dashboard

The graph reflects data from the students you’ve selected (all students or an individual student) in your filters. On the column list in this section, you can see student names and a Total number, which calculates all posts, replies, and likes the student has made. Select one of the bars on the graph that corresponds to a specific date, and the column will change to only show activity from that date.

You can learn more about Insights in the video below or watch the class we offered last week. Then read on to learn about the data categories.