What is Task insights?

Task insights is a powerful analytics tool designed to help monitor and inform the homework policy across your school. It allows staff to analyse task data across the school, groups of students or staff, and time periods, visualise the data in graphs or export the raw data in XLS format.

View Task insights

🔒 The actions within this page are controlled by the Task insights permission

To access the Task insights, navigate to Homework → Insights.

You could also go to Reports → Task insights.

Filter Task insights

The filtering options at the top of the page are used to identify what area of the school you want to investigate.

Data records:

Tasks count – counts each task as one unit
Tasks duration(min) – counts the expected duration of each task

Dates:

Academic year
Date - Focus on tasks either issued on OR due on within your chosen date range
Date range - Define the beginning and end of the period you’d like to investigate

By default, the date range covers the past 4 weeks. You can customise this to a specific timeframe.

In More filters you will find even more options to define the scope of your analysis. Toggle on each setting to view all available options.

Filter tasks by:

Due status
Task types
Subjects
Issued by staff
Submission methods

Filter tasks set to by:

Year groups
Groups

💡 You can also choose to include or exclude the selected group in your dataset

Once your filters are selected, make sure to click Apply. Active filters will be shown at the bottom of the page.

Export data

At the top right of the page there is a button to export task insights into a PDF, allowing you to customise and download a visual report of the current charts/tables.

Alternatively, change from ‘Explorer’ mode to ‘Raw data’ and choose to export raw data, which downloads all task data into a CSV which you can analyse using an external tool.

If you're only interested in a specific section, then each chart / table includes its own export options:

View data – reveals the underlying table for the chart
Export data – downloads the data table as a CSV

Use cases

Task insights are versatile and customisable. We’ve outlined a few common use cases on how to use each of the available graphs below.

Task count or duration by category

Choose to see a summary of proportional tasks / task durations by:

Year groups
Task types
Subjects
Submission methods

Tasks over time

The second graph allows you to compare how much homework has been set over time. By default, the graph is set to compare task types, but you can choose from multiple options including:

Year groups
Task types
Subjects
Submission methods

You can choose to monitor these variables:

Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Termly

Click and drag your mouse on a graph to zoom in, and double click to rescale. These actions can also be taken using the icons when hovering over the right side of the graph.

📝 Use case - Comparing the duration of tasks per department each week.

Choose ‘Subjects’ on the ‘Data to display’ dropdown and ‘Weekly’ on the 'Frequency' menu.

Compare tasks / task duration by a variable

This third graph on this page is a highly flexible bar chart.

By default the X-axis is set to compare task types but you can choose from multiple options, including:

Task types
Subjects
Teachers
Submission method
Year groups
Groups

There are many use cases of how you can use this variable and the filter at the top of the page to give you valuable insights.

📝 Use case 1 - Comparing the volume of tasks set to each year groups.

Select ‘Year groups’ on the x axis to show you the distribution of tasks set to each year group.

📝 Use case 2 - As a head of department / head of year, you may wish to check submission rates for your area at a high level; apply a subject filter at the top of the report, select ‘groups’ in the X axis, click the ‘View submission status’ toggle and scroll down to see the new ‘submission status per group’ chart below. Toggle between measuring the percentage or the count of submissions.

Task count or duration by two variables

The ‘heatmap’ style chart at the very bottom of the Task Insights page allows you to see the count / duration of tasks set based on two variables of your choosing.

📝 Use case - Staff may be required to set homework on specific days of the week based on the subject they teach i.e. English should be set on Mondays, Maths should be Tuesdays etc.

Select ‘Tasks count’ as your data record type at the very top of the page
Change X axis to ‘Teacher’
Change Y axis to ‘Weekday’
Colour gradient indicates low volumes (light) and high volumes (dark) of tasks set
Hover over coloured squares to see details of tasks set per teacher on each day of the week

The heatmap quickly show if staff are adhering to this or setting tasks outside of their allocated days. If staff teach more than one subject, make sure the relevant ‘Subject’ filter is applied at the top of the page to ensure irrelevant data is not included.

FAQ

Question	Answer
Does the export include filters I’ve applied?	Yes. Both CSV and PDF exports reflect the filters in use, as well as the exports on individual graphs.
Can I see full task details including the description in this report?	No, please use the Issued Tasks Report for this.
Can I see the grades that students obtained for their submissions in this report?	No, please use the Student Submissions Report for this.