D2L Brightspace Tips: Brightspace Data Sets
The Brightspace data sets can be queried in Domo Analytics and the results can be download in CSV or Excel format if you have access to Insights Report Builder. However, the documentation currently available for some of the data sets for Quizzes and Grades is not entirely accurate. The following are additions or corrections to the official documentation.
Quiz Question Answers
"Returns possible answers for a given quiz question."
Addition: EXCEPT FOR for short answer or fill in the blank questions.
Quiz Question Answer Options
"Returns possible options for a given quiz answer. For example, in a multi select question type, it displays the options the users can choose from."
Addition: ONLY for short answer or fill in the blank questions.
Correction: The multi-select options are in Quiz Question Answers, not in Quiz Question Answer Options. Additionally, the description for the AnswerText column is "user answer" which is not correct since this data set is only what the instructor has entered when creating the possible answer choices.
Quiz User Answers
"Returns data to describe the option a user chose or the answer a user provided for a question."
Correction: This data set only provides the score the student received for the question, what page the question appeared on, the question number in the quiz, etc. That is not describing the student's response, but rather the question the student was given in the quiz.
Quiz User Answer Responses
"Returns details on how a user answered a specific quiz question. Data includes whether an answer is correct and details around the quiz score".
Correction: Score is a field in Quiz User Answers for each individual question, and Quiz Attempts for the entire quiz.
Grade Objects Log and Grade Results
Both of these data sets should only contain data for students if grades have been entered in the grade book in the course. However, sometimes the Modified column in Grade Objects Log and the LastModified column in Grades Results will include a timestamp for each student even when there are no grades in the course and the grade book was never actually set up. I have not yet determined what these columns are actually logging.
Sample ETL Workflows
ETL data flows for querying the data sets are available for downloading various reports.