How to track time log for teachers

Question

Hi! I would like to know if there's a way to check the total time spent on Canvas as a teacher. I know students have this feature, but as for me I can only check the times where I logged and how many times I've seen a page. What I would really like to know is the total amount of hours spent on the page as a teacher. Can't find this statistic anywhere.

James · Accepted Answer

@KrisneyUrribarr

The instructor can see the total amount of time that any user, including teachers, from the People page. It shows the last activity and the total time. The last activity is fairly reliable, but the total time is not reliable and I would not trust it for any kind of "minimum time spent in the course" measurement. I have not found it to be a useful predictor of student success for my stats class either (we analyze the course each semester to determine what shows a significant relation with success). Where I have found it helpful is when a student is failing and the number is low, it validates that the student is not putting in the time.

See the View Users section of How do I use the People page in a course as an instructor? for more details on last activity and total activity.

I download the last activity and total activity information from the Canvas REST API for all of our courses every night. This allows me to track how much time students spend over time. The number in you see on the People page is the current amount. If it says someone spent 519 hours in a course (that's what Canvas reports for me in my stats class last semester), I have no idea whether I was overly active at the beginning of the semester and then slacked off at the end of was consistent in my time throughout the course. The same thing applies for the last activity. If a student was last active this week on Wednesday, it doesn't tell me that the time before that was three weeks ago.

I know that the Access Report will show you have many times you've viewed a page, but I am not sure what you're asking about when you want to know the total amount of hours spent on a page. I don't know of anywhere in Canvas that tells how long was spent on a specific page, just how many times you've viewed it.