Open edX® Tutorial: Get Started with the Open edX® Instructor Dashboard
The Open edX learning management system (LMS) comes with an Instructor Dashboard to manage your learners in the Open edX platform. In this tutorial you will learn an overview of the Open edX Instructor Dashboard and how to access it.
How do you access the Instructor Dashboard?
Login to your Open edX LMS, go to any course and you will find the Instructor Dashboard tab there.
If you don’t know how to access your Open edX LMS then ask your Open edX service provider for the link. If you don’t have an Open edX service provider, you can use this form to contact our team. Go ahead and login to your LMS, which will take you to your Dashboard where you will find all your courses. Inside each course you will find an Instructor Dashboard for that course. The tab can be found next to the other common course tabs, including Course, Discussion, Wiki, and Progress. The tab for accessing the Instructor Dashboard can be seen in the below image in blue.
Image: Screenshot of the Open edX Instructor Dashboard tab highlighted next to the other tabs named Course, Discussion, Wiki, and Progress.
There are a number of pages inside the Instructor Dashboard that all offer features that instructor’s are able to use to manage their learners. When you click Instructor Dashboard from inside a course, the Instructor Dashboard will appear will all the available pages listed in order: Course Info, Membership, Cohorts, Extensions, Student Admin, Data Download, and Analytics.
In this tutorial we will summarise the main use of each page.
Course Info
As seen in the above image, the Course Info page of the Instructor Dashboard shows you an overview of the course information, including the number of enrolees (admins, staff and students buy track), course name, course run, course number, organisation, start date, end date, course status (started and ended), number of sections, and grade cutoffs.
Membership
As seen in the below image, the Membership page of the Instructor Dashboard allows you to enrol learners into the course, enrol beta testers into the course, and to give additional permissions to users such as Discussion Forum Moderator.
Image: Screenshot of the Membership page in the Instructor Dashboard.
Cohorts
As seen in the below image, the Cohorts page of the Instructor Dashboard allows you to create learner-specific cohorts. Later, you can assign certain learning content to the particular cohorts.
Image: Screenshot of the Cohorts page in the Instructor Dashboard.
Extensions
As seen in the below image, the Extensions page of the Instructor Dashboard allows you to give due date extensions to learners.
Image: Screenshot of the Extensions page in the Instructor Dashboard.
Student Admin
As seen in the below image, the Student Admin page of the Instructor Dashboard allows you to view, reset and edit grades for all learners or particular learners.
Image: Screenshot of the Student Admin page in the Instructor Dashboard.
Data Download
As seen in the below image, the Data Download page of the Instructor Dashboard allows you to view the Gradebook (for small class sizes), and download course and learner data in the format of Excel sheets.
Image: Screenshot of the Data Download page in the Instructor Dashboard.
Analytics
As seen in the below image, the Analytics page of the Instructor Dashboard allows you to view advanced analytics of the course data.
Image: Screenshot of the Analytics page in the Instructor Dashboard.
In future tutorials, we will explain all these pages in detail and work through each feature to give you a perfect understanding of how to use each feature of the Open edX Instructor Dashboard.