Watershed's Report Builder, our report-creation tool, enables you to create dynamic dashboards designed to show off learning data and learning’s impact across your organization.
Report Builder provides a variety of visualization types, data filters, and display options to create any number of reports—ranging from basic leaderboards to detailed, multi-visualization reports designed for learning data.
Check out our latest Watershed product updates that enhance Report Builder's access permissions and search capabilities.
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Report Builder Access in Watershed
During the last few years, our clients have been accomplishing some amazing things with Report Builder (formerly known as Explore).
As organizations give more users access to Watershed, there’s also a growing need to limit which users have permissions to create or edit dashboards. The ability to limit Report Builder access is useful for a variety of reasons.
For instance, some organizations want to keep the Watershed experience extremely simple for certain users, while other organizations that share dashboards across a large number of people need to restrict editing rights to maintain consistency.
Watershed's Report Builder Access functionality offers a few ways to control which of your users can access Report Builder. You also can give access to individuals or entire teams.
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Advanced Report Builder Filters for L&D Reporting
Anyone with access to Report Builder can configure data with standard, easy-to-use filters—such as activities, people, groups, and/or time periods.
These filters correspond to how data is stored in xAPI’s ‘actor/verb/object’ pattern. (Note: Most data stored in Watershed is stored in the xAPI format.)
As our client base uses more advanced xAPI concepts to store data, we’re introducing new Report Builder functionality to filter these advanced concepts. The two concepts we’ve added are contextActivities and extensions. Keep in mind, you may need knowledge of xAPI to fully understand these concepts.
contextActivities
Quiz data is often stored in contextActivities. Each question in the quiz has its own object.id, and each question is linked to the overall quiz by using the quiz’s object.id in contextActivities.
Now, you can give your users the option to include contextActivities in their Activity filter searches when using Report Builder with the Related Activities option.
By default, the Activity filter search in Report Builder only searches object.id; but when this option is checked, the Activity filter search also will include contextActivities.
Extensions
The extensions field in xAPI statements is extremely versatile and can be used to store a wide variety of information, including (but definitely not limited to):
- browser information in content consumption data,
- video duration in video view data,
- results returned for search query data,
- and more.
With the new extensions filter in Report Builder, users can filter by the data stored in extensions—which opens up data that users haven’t been able to access in the past.
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Watershed Report Builder FAQ
Are the new Report Builder filters in my account automatically?
The new filters are turned off by default in all accounts.
How can I turn on the new Report Builder filters in my account?
Check out our Report Builder Access help guide for details on setting these filters up in your account.
Who sees Report Builder by default?
By default, Admins are the only user-type that can see Report Builder. However, Admins can provide access to specific users so they can also see Report Builder.
How can I give all my users permission to see Report Builder?
On the Report Builder Access page, search for “All Parts of Your Organization.”
Can I restrict Related Activities or Extensions filtering to certain users?
No, you can’t restrict filtering to certain users. If you enable filtering for any Report Builder user in your organization, you’ll enable it for all Report Builder users.
Where can I learn more about xAPI, contextActivities, and extensions?
Check out these resources to learn more:
About the author
Brooks Alford is a tenured client success and operations leader who helps companies make innovative and complex technology accessible to all.
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