Bb Learn Course Reports -- Discussion Board Stats Information

This is additional information on statistics that you can gather from Course Reports on the Discussion Board in Bb Learn. This information was obtained from Drexel ITG, the central technology office for Bb Learn.

  1. A "view," which is given when you hover over the timestamp in the upper right-hand corner of a discussion board post, is the same as a "read" in the "Discussion Tracking" report in Bb Learn.
  2. A "read" in the "Discussion Tracking" report in Bb Learn is whenever you scroll past a discussion board post in a thread. A "read" is also counted when a post in a thread is created unless it is the start of the thread. Posts are also marked as read when viewed through the Global Navigation.
  3. Assuming "reads" and "views" are the same thing, "hits" that are counted in the "User Activity in Forums" report are still something else. Hits are different from views/reads. Hits are more counting page being accessed rather than the messages that are viewed.
  4. Each time you enter a discussion board and see the list of forums page in a Bb Learn course, that's a hit (a page viewed).
  5. Each time you enter a forum in a discussion board and see a list of threads, that's a hit (a page viewed).
  6. Each time you click a thread in a discussion board, that's a hit (a page viewed).
  7. A link to a thread in a discussion board is what is meant by "message" in the "Counting System Hits" area at the bottom of the "Course Reports" page from the Bb Learn manual found in the "Help" section in Bb Learn - https://en-us.help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Performance/Course_Reports

  8. Once you are inside a thread, no additional hits are registered for simply viewing or scrolling past the posts within that thread.
  9. Once you are inside a thread, every time you scroll past a particular post within that thread, the "read" or "view" for that post is increased by one.
  10. A student's session would tend to have more "read/views" than "hits," even though simply accessing a post in a thread from outside the discussion board would count as 3 hits.

For items 4-6, the use of "viewed" might be a little confusing. For those items, when they say, "this is a page viewed," they mean the page has been seen and gained a "Hit" in the "User Activity Forum" report, but only in the case of item #6 would the "Hit" coincide with a "View" or "Read" on a discussion board post in a thread or in the "Discussion Tracking" report. Hits are talking about the pages that load, like the Discussion Forum page, or the Thread Listing page. A view or read is only marked when someone has scrolled past a post. So a single hit to a page could result in reads for different posts.