See engagement in action - the Student Time Spent metric reveals how much time learners dedicate to exploring, interacting with, and mastering your content.
What Data is Used
The Time Spent metric provides an estimate of how long learners actively engage with lessons inside the Course Player. We measure learner activity through several interactions:
- Lesson views: when a learner opens a lesson
- Video plays: when a learner watches a video
- Lesson completions: when a lesson is marked complete
- Lesson incompletions: when a lesson is marked incomplete
- Quiz, survey, and assignment submissions: when a learner completes and submits these activities
How It Works
Time Spent is calculated as the time between a sequence of learner activities. For example: if a learner views a lesson and then, 3 minutes later, marks it as complete or moves to another lesson, we count 3 minutes as the time spent on that lesson. There are also some additional rules added to time spent calculations:
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Session timeout:
- Non-video lessons: If more than 30 minutes pass without another action from the learner, we assume they became inactive. In this case, we apply a global average of 2 minutes for that interaction.
- Video lessons: For native Thinkific video lessons, we use both the playback start time and the video’s full duration to calculate time spent more accurately. In this case, the standard 30-minute timeout is added on top of the video duration. For example, if a video is 50 minutes long, the maximum session timeout would be 80 minutes (50 minutes of video time + 30 minutes of session timeout). Note that this only applies to videos hosted by Thinkific and doesn't apply to embedded video content from YouTube.
See the following table for a few examples of how Time Spent is calculated:
| Learner Activity | Timestamp | Time Spent Per Activity | Running Total | Calculation Reasoning |
| Learner A views lesson 1 | 1:00 PM | 15 min | 15 min | Calculated as time between the next activity and the current activity (1:15 PM - 1:00 PM) |
| Learner A completes lesson 1 | 1:15 PM | 5 min | 20 min | Calculated as time between the next activity and the current activity (1:20 PM - 1:15 PM) |
| Learner A starts a 20 minute video starting at 0:00 of the video | 1:20 PM | 2 min | 22 min | Assumed due to the next activity occurring before 2:10PM (20 min video time + 30 min session timeout = 50 min. 1:20 PM + 50 min = 2:10 PM) |
| Learner A completes a survey | 5:00 PM | 2 min | 24 min | Assumed due to no next activity |
Where to Find This Metric
Student Time Spent can be found within the Course Engagement dashboards and within Course Engagement when building custom reports in Advanced Analytics, under the Total Time Spent and Average Time to Complete columns.