District Data Dashboard: Pilot

Why a district data dashboard?

We have heard from school district administrators who support computer science education that it would be helpful for them to know more about their districts’ usage of Code.org. We understand that it is important for districts to be able to track usage of online learning platforms and that it is considered standard practice for education content providers to share this data with districts to enable better decision making.

In this spirit, we are piloting a ‘district data dashboard’ that provides basic metrics to help administrators visualize and understand where Code.org is being used to teach computer science in their districts. Hopefully, access to this data will better equip administrators to understand, champion, and celebrate computer science education.

Why a pilot?

During the initial design phase, we collected feedback from teachers, administrators and representatives from our regional partner program. The purpose of this pilot is to collect feedback from administrators about how they use the dashboard and make improvements to better fit the needs of our educator community.

Metrics in the dashboard

The metrics that are currently available in the district dashboard are representations of usage of the Code.org platform organized by school, teacher, grade, and student.  We currently don’t surface learning outcomes in this dashboard.

Student Demographics

The dashboard can be filtered by student gender (as available). We hope that this allows administrators to track whether computer science education is being implemented equitably across genders.

Limitations

The data in this dashboard is not meant for student or teacher evaluation and has severe limitations for such purposes:

• The dashboard does not reflect time spent teaching and learning computer science outside of the Code.org platform.
• The dashboard does not reflect work done on the platform while not signed in.
• The dashboard does not show progress made on any of the Code.org ‘unplugged’ activities.

Finally, keep in mind that none of the metrics presented in the dashboard can be used to assess learning outcomes. These metrics are only a reflection of whether the student, classroom, or school has been active on the Code.org platform, not whether they have learned.

Key metrics

In addition to showing which schools, teachers, and students are using the Code.org platform, the district data dashboard shows how much progress teachers and students have made. “Making progress” simply means that a student has attempted levels, it is not a measure of proficiency.

A level is a discrete activity in a course and can take the form of a programming puzzle, multiple choice question, or a free response prompt. On average, a student takes two minutes to complete a level, but more complex levels can take over five minutes to complete on average.

The specific progress metrics surfaced in this dashboard are:

• Average Percent of Course Completed: the percentage of levels in a course that the student has attempted. It does not include Hour of Code activities. It is calculated at the student-and-course level before taking the average.

• This metric can be used to measure engagement with a particular course.
• One limitation of this metric is that sometimes teachers and students choose to do levels across a variety of courses and activities. In that case, the percent of course completed will not be an accurate measure of their engagement with the platform as a whole.

• Median Levels Attempted per Student: the number of levels attempted across all of the courses and Hour of Code tutorials the student has started. It is calculated at the student level before taking the median.

• This metric, along with “Percentage of Students with Projects,” can be used as a measure of engagement with the platform as a whole.
• One limitation of this metric is that different courses contain different numbers of levels and some levels are designed to be much more difficult or time consuming than others. For this reason, it can be misleading to compare median levels attempted across courses or grade levels.

• Percentage of Students with Projects: is the percentage of students using the platform who have created at least one independent, standalone project outside of the structured courses or Hour of Code activities.  

• This metric, along with “Median Levels Attempted per Student,” can be used as a measure of engagement with the platform as a whole and is especially useful where students are working outside of the progression of one of our courses.

More information

For more information about each of the metrics and ideas about how you might leverage them in your district, visit the documentation page.