Make sense of Insights
Insights is the part of the console you read rather than work. It tells you how a cohort is travelling and what content is landing, so you can point limited support at the place that needs it before anyone raises a hand. This guide walks through how to read it well and, just as important, what it will never tell you.
The skill here is restraint. Insights surfaces a lot of context, but most weeks it is informing you, not asking you to act. Learning to read the shape across weeks — and to leave a quiet week alone — is what keeps your attention sharp for the slides that actually matter.
Insights never identifies, names, or ranks an individual student. It is aggregate only, and any group too small to be safely aggregated is suppressed rather than shown. It points you at a cohort or a campus, not a person. It is not a watchlist, and it is not a way to find "who is struggling." When you need to help a specific student, that comes from a help request in the inbox, not from Insights.
Walk through it
- Read the Pulse for direction of travel
Open Pulse. It shows how a cohort feels, drawn from the weekly check-in, week by week. Read the curve, not a single number: one quiet week is noise, a two-week slide across the cohort is a signal. Watch the response count too — if sentiment looks flat but fewer students are answering, the people dropping out of the data may be the ones struggling most.
- Read Reach for what students actually open
Switch to Reach. Pulse tells you how a cohort feels; Reach tells you what they do — which events, blocks, and to-dos land, and how engagement is trending. Pair the two: a Pulse slide alongside thin Reach is a different problem from a Pulse slide while Reach is healthy.
- Understand the privacy line before you read anything into it
Both views are aggregate only. Pulse hides any breakdown with fewer than five students behind it; Reach stays empty until there are enough interactions in the window. A suppressed cell is the system working, not data missing. If you need a read on a small group, widen the slice until enough students sit behind it rather than treating the blank as a gap to fill.
- Decide where to direct support this week
Turn the picture into one decision. A cohort drifting in Pulse might warrant a briefing or an event; a block with low Reach might be mistimed or mis-targeted and worth moving or re-targeting. Pick the one or two places that need you, and let the steady weeks pass.
- Export when you need it on paper
When the story has to travel to leadership or your IR team, export the data as CSV, or pull the board-ready Support for Students report. The export carries the week-by-week history, so it shows trajectory rather than a single snapshot — the same "read the curve" principle, applied to the people you report to.
Quick checklist
- Read Pulse as a curve across weeks, not a single week's number
- Check the response count, not just the sentiment
- Read Reach alongside Pulse before drawing a conclusion
- Treat any suppressed cell as the privacy floor working, not missing data
- Widen the slice rather than chase a small-group breakdown
- Land on one or two places to direct support this week
- Export the history when leadership needs the story on paper
Common questions
Can I use Insights to find which students are struggling?
No. Insights is aggregate only and never names or ranks individuals — it is not a watchlist by design. It points you at a cohort or a campus. The students who need a person reach you through help requests in the inbox; that is where individual support starts.
Why is part of my cohort showing no numbers?
Because fewer than five students sit behind that slice, so Pulse suppresses the breakdown. The same logic keeps Reach empty until there are enough interactions. Widen the filter until enough students are behind it, and the numbers reappear.
Pulse is sliding but Reach looks fine. What does that tell me?
That the content is being seen but the cohort is still drifting, so the lever is probably not "publish more" — it may be a briefing, an event, or a closer look at what is going on that week. A slide alongside thin Reach would point the other way: people may simply not be seeing what you publish.
Related
The fastest answer is usually one question away.