The heatmap

For educators

The heatmap under activity reports, for each document, how often each page was cited as a source in an answer.

Where course insights tells you a topic drew questions, the heatmap tells you which page did.

Reading it

One chart per document, one bar per page. Bar height is the number of times that page was cited. Pages never cited appear muted.

Each chart is headed by the document’s name, its page count, and its total number of references. The search box filters the list by document name.

A heatmap chart headed Master_thesis.pdf, 66 pages, 28 total references, plotting Citations against Page from 1 to 66, with a dense cluster of bars between pages 19 and 27 peaking at 3 citations, single bars near pages 12, 15, 41, 49, 54 and 56, another peak of 3 at page 45, and a date range of 2nd of June 2026 to 2nd of August 2026 with a Search documents box above it — One chart per document, one bar per page.

A page in detail

Selecting a bar opens the page itself, alongside:

The questions that cited it: what students actually asked when this page was used, newest first
The sources cited on it: the specific passages the answers drew on, with how many times each was used
Open in reader: to see the page in context

Page 23 of 66 of Master_thesis.pdf shown as a thumbnail, with paging arrows and an Open in reader link at the top, beside a Student questions list of three timestamped questions — how to choose a time step for a transient simulation, how the sliding mesh method works in ANSYS Fluent, and what the Courant number is — each tagged How-to steps or Explaining the concept, above a Sources on this page (cited in answers) panel listing the cited passages with their use counts — A page, the questions that reached it, and the passage the answer used.

Paging controls step through the document page by page without returning to the chart, so neighbouring pages can be checked as well. They do not skip to the next cited page.

This is the most direct route from “something here is unclear” to the passage responsible.

Interpreting the pattern

A tall bar is not itself a problem. It means the page is load-bearing: it is where the answers to real questions live.

What is worth attention is a tall bar on a page you consider incidental, which usually means the page carries something students need that you had not treated as central. The paired questions list will say which.

Equally informative is a long run of untouched pages in material you expected to be central.

Why it may be empty

Two distinct messages, with different causes:

“No documents with location data found”: nothing in the course has page-level location data to plot, or the search box is filtering everything out. Clear the search first; if the message stays, upload material and let it finish processing.

“No page references in this period for the matching documents”: documents exist, but no answer has cited them inside the selected period. Citations accumulate as students ask questions that the material can answer; widening the date range often fills the chart.