📊Using Canvas Course Analytics

The Canvas Course Analytics tool provides access to data that you can use to learn more about how your students are interacting with your course. Note that this data is not live and is only refreshed every 8 hours.

There are limitations to what analytics data can tell you.

The thing to keep in mind when using any sort of learning analytics data is that there are limitations to what it can tell you.

In other words: data is only as objective as the people who built the systems capturing and reporting them, and the people interpreting them.

Data doesn’t always mean what you think it means, so we need to be thoughtful about how we use it. Learning analytics in isolation can’t report whether a student is “engaging” with content. For example, they might open and immediately close a document just to make sure they could access it, or alternatively, open the document to make sure they could access it and then leave it open while they did something else. Learning analytics provide indicators, not certainties, and so they’re best used alongside traditional methods for measuring engagement with course content.

Generally,

• Played ≠ Watched – people start videos and then do other things while the video plays.
• Viewed ≠ Read – Canvas marks a page as viewed if it has been open for at least 3 seconds.
• Time spent ≠ Engagement – students can open your Canvas site and then leave for work, and Canvas keeps counting the time even though no one is looking at the screen.

The following video provides a quick overview of the tool. Detailed instructions are below the video.

The Weekly Online Activity Dashboard

The Weekly Online Activity tab is the most useful dashboard. It provides an interactive graph of page views and participations by week. You can also review an accessible data table with the same information by selecting the Chart Options button at the top right.

There are two separate graphs on the page, one showing page views and one showing participation. Note that participation analytics only include very specific things: submitting an assignment, starting to take a quiz, submitting a quiz, posting a discussion comment, loading a Collaboration in the Collaboration tool, and posting a comment to an announcement (if that functionality is turned on).

You can compare individual students to the class average by adding the student to the section area at the top of the page using the drop down. If you have combined courses or ad hoc sections, you can also compare those to the class average. This image shows the class averages in blue and a single student in green. There is a horizontal scroll bar below each graph to access previous weeks.

Mousing over each weekly dot will pop up additional information about that data point. Selecting a dot will trigger the Individual Participation and Page Views panel to slide out on the right with more information about that week.

Individual Participation and Page Views

This panel shows you the number of students who viewed anything in Canvas that week. It also shows the number of students who participated by submitting an assignment, starting to take a quiz, submitting a quiz, or posting a discussion comment during the selected week. The table below contains two tabs, a Students tab and a Resources tab. The Student tab shows numbers of page views and participations for each student and can be sorted by either column.

The Page View column on the Students tab is helpful to let you know if a particular student is accessing pages at a much higher rate than the class average. Students who are anxious about a course, concerned that they are missing something, unable to find something they are looking for (which may or may not be in the course – like specific instructions for something you may have recommended that students do), or repeatedly reviewing the same material and not able to make sense of it will have much higher page views. Look for your outliers and consider reaching out (see “Message students who” below).

The Resources tab shows what resources in the course are being accessed that particular week. This can be helpful to let you know if important resources are not being accessed, perhaps because students may not be able to find them. For example, resources that were sent out only in an announcement and not added to the module may easily be missed, especially if students have turned off announcement notifications.

Message students who

You can select the blue numbers by Viewed, Didn’t View, Participated, or Didn’t Participate at the top of the panel to access a “Message students who” tool. This is a different tool than the messaging tool in the gradebook. Here you can message students who viewed or didn’t view a particular resource or participated in or didn’t participate in a particular activity. For example, at the end of the first week of classes you may want to message students who have not viewed the syllabus or additional course information. Before an exam, you may want to message students who have not viewed the exam resources.

The message goes to the student’s Canvas Inbox and no one sees who else receives the message.

You can choose the criteria for who to message by selecting the proper tab at the top and then choose the resource or activity in the Resource field. There is a drop-down menu, but not everything will be in the dropdown list. Begin typing the name of the resource in the Resource box to find the page, file, discussion, etc.

Selecting the “number of students” link will show you a list of the names of the students meeting the criteria. Selecting the edit/pencil icon will allow you remove students from the list. For example, if you know a student was ill and you had given them an extension on an assignment, you can remove them from a message reminding students about that assignment.

The Course Grade Dashboard

The Course Grade tab shows the average grade on each graded assignment. You can review an accessible data table version by selecting “Chart Options” on the right. To view the assignment name, mouse over the dot (or the icon below it).

As on the Weekly Activity dashboard, You can compare individual students or sections to the class average by adding the student to the section area at the top of the page using the drop down. Additionally, you can filter based on assignment type by selecting or deselecting the assignments, discussions, or quizzes checkboxes.

The Grade Distributions, Missing and Late Assignments panel

You can select any dot on the graph to view the grade distribution for that assignment. The Grade Distributions, Missing and Late Assignments panel will open on the right side. You can select the number of missing or late assignments to see the student names. The little envelope icon at the top right of that panel takes you to a “Message Students Who” tool that gives you some different options for messaging.

Course-wide Message Students Who

When you select the envelope icon on the Grade Distributions, Missing and Late Assignments panel, a window will pop up allowing you to draft a message to your student(s) based on a specific course grate range, missing or late assignment. This is, yet again, a different Message Students Who tool. In this instance you can message students whose course grade is within a range, or those who have missed any assignment or turned any assignment in late. Note that your students’ course grade may not be accurate if missing assignments are not graded as 0.

If you want to message students who scored within a range on a specific assignment, have not turned in that specific assignment, or turned in that specific assignment late, you must use the Message Students Who tool in the Canvas Grades tool.

This Message Students Who is a tool you might want to use after you have collected a few assignments toward the beginning of the semester to reach out to students who are struggling. If you accept late work, you can also use at various points in the semester to remind students to turn in work that they are missing. This way, it only goes to students with missing assignments (as opposed to a general announcement, which could cause students without missing assignments to panic).

The Students Dashboard

The Students Dashboard provides some additional information when you have concerns about a particular student. It shows the student’s course grade, percent of on time submissions, their last participation, their last page view, the number of page views for the course in total, and number of participations for the course in total.

If you have a student that stopped attending class and you want to note that in the Student Activity Report (SAR), the Last Participation date here can be used, especially  if it is later than the last date you saw the student in class. It indicates the last time a student actively interacted with Canvas assignments, quizzes, or discussions, which may not be the same as the last date they logged in.

Selecting a specific student will open a set of tabs showing you the assignment grades, participation and page views, and communications for only that student.

The Reports Dashboard

The Reports dashboard allows you to download any of the other dashboard reports in CSV format for you to analyze with Excel or other software.

Questions? Talk to your campus teaching and learning center!