The facilitation dashboard provides an overview of the learner and educator comments in a given run of your course.

Find the dashboard in Course Creator

To access the dashboard, you will need organisation admin, author or facilitator permission in Course Creator.

Organisation admins and course Authors can select the facilitation tab in the top right of a course run and the facilitation dashboard within it.

Those who only have Facilitator permission may not have access to the dashboard via Course Creator, but they can access it through a course's Conversations tab. The option appears in the black bar at the top right of the screen, as shown in the screenshot below:

You can also add /facilitation to your course's URL.

Using the dashboard

The dashboard displays data for the course week. Change the week you wish to view in the top right (A in the screenshot below) by using the arrows. These are course weeks, not calendar weeks.

The graph shows how many comments are on each step of a week of your course. Hover over a data point (B in the screenshot below) on the graph to see the exact number of comments on a step. Click on any of the step numbers on the graph's X axis at the bottom (C in the screenshot) to go to that step on the course.

Date filter

Use the date selector at the top of the page to view data on the graph from a specific period. This will update thee comments list and top influencers below the graph to show data from the time period you specified (see below). 

This is an easy way to review recent comments for on demand courses. 

Things to look out for

Use the graph to spot peaks and troughs of activity across a course week. Does this match your expectations? If a discussion step doesn’t have many comments on it, think about why. Consider ways to encourage more conversation. 

If a video step has a significant number of comments on it, but doesn't include a discussion prompt, take a look at what people are talking about in case there is a problem - for example, the video might not be working properly, not have subtitles, or provoke some strong opinions that could benefit from course team intervention.

Comments are not enabled on quizzes, tests, exercise steps and peer review assessments, so they will always appear on the graph with 0 comments.

Comments

The comment feed shows all comments posted during the week, with replies threaded underneath. You can pin, reply, and like these comments via the dashboard page in the same way as you would in the comment section of a course step.

Filter the comments by step using the drop down menu on the right.

If someone in your course team has responded to a comment, a Course team replied label will appear next to the learner's name. 

Select the link to the step, if you would like to review the comment in its original context.

Top influencers

Influence is difficult to measure. For now, a list of top influencers within a week of a course is provided based on the average number of likes per comment.  

Use this to see which learners are posting comments that are valued by the community, or to view the influence of your own course team. 

Weekly sentiment

On the end-of-week step, learners are asked to rate their experience of the course in a low-effort, engaging way. 

You can download weekly sentiment survey results as CSV files from the facilitation dashboard or stats dashboard.

Terminology on this page that you aren’t familiar with? Check out our glossary. 

Contact FutureLearn