How to get when student last accessed course via API?

Question

Hello,

We are trying to create reports that include when a student last accessed their course. I know this can be done with the data portal by getting the latest request timestamp in the requests table but that is a few days behind - we need it in real time. I am not seeing a quick way to do this with the API. I only see going through every request the user has made between the start of the term and current day then loop through until I hit the course ID.

Is there a better way I'm not seeing or are these two ways my only options?

Thank you,

Nick

agschmid · Answer

There is the GET /api/v1/courses/:course_id/recent_students call, but then you would need to parse the students in that course:

https://canvas.beta.instructure.com/doc/api/courses.html#method.courses.recent_students

Jerry_Nguyen1 · Answer

@ntyler1

You can try to get this data through GraphQL (playground is accessible at youracademy.instructure.com/graphiql). The following query will return the last activity (date/time) of a user in each enrolled course

query MyQuery {
  legacyNode(_id: "9", type: User) {
    ... on User {
      email
      _id
      enrollments {
        lastActivityAt
        course {
          name
        }
      }
    }
  }
}