Reading conversations

For educators

The conversations view under activity lists the conversations students had with the course, most recent first, and lets you read them.

The dashboard reports that something happened. This shows what was said.

What you see

Each conversation is listed by a short title written by Alexandria summarising what it was about. The title is all the list carries: no date, no student, no question count.

The conversations list down the left of the activity view, showing AI-written titles such as Core Concept Analysis, Choosing Transient Simulation, SST k-omega vs k-epsilon, Understanding Stokes Number, Understanding Y Plus in Meshing and Understanding the Courant Number, followed by a long run of entries titled Practice chat, with no names or dates beside any of them — The list is titles only. Nothing identifies who asked.

Opening one shows the exchange in full: the questions students asked and the answers they received, citations included.

An opened conversation titled What is the Courant number, showing the AI answer generated from the course material with 15 sources, numbered citation chips through the text, the CFL equation rendered as mathematics, sections headed The Core Concept and Why It Matters for Stability, and an embedded CFL Stability Visualizer with Fluid Velocity and Time Step sliders reading a Courant number of 0.50, Stable — An opened conversation, with the citations the answer was built from.

Titles are the fastest way in. Scanning the most recent screenful is often enough to see a pattern without reading anything in full.

What you can do

The view is read-only. You cannot rename or delete a student’s conversation, and you cannot continue one or ask a follow-up inside it.

There is no search or filter here; conversations are browsed chronologically, loading more as you scroll. The period control that governs the rest of the activity view is absent here, so the list cannot be narrowed to a week.

What is visible

Conversations are listed without student names attached, so browsing shows you what the cohort asked rather than who asked it.

The content itself is not redacted. Opening a conversation shows the questions and answers as they were written.

Using it well

The value is in reading a few rather than all of them.

When a figure on the dashboard looks strange, a topic drawing far more questions than expected, a spike on a quiet week, the explanation is usually obvious within two or three conversations. Students phrase confusion plainly, and the wording often shows the misconception directly.

Telling students that you read conversations is worth doing. In our experience it changes what they ask for the better, and it is a difficult thing to discover afterwards.

Availability

Requires the Educator role. An institution can disable course analytics entirely, in which case this area is unavailable.