Faculty login notifications for administration?

GraceStephens23

Is there a way for administration to receive notifications on faculty Canvas usage? E.g. if a teacher has not logged into Canvas for X number of days, or hasn't graded any assignments in X amount of time, is there an option to trigger a notification? 

James

@GraceStephens23,

The reason that people are recommending Instructor Insight instead of telling you how to do it with Canvas is that there Canvas has no built-in way to make this happen. There is no hidden screen you can go to and enable it. Using a third-party integration is the quickest way to get a solution.

Here is what would be involved if you wanted to write your own solution.

You can get the data out of Canvas through the API, Live Events, or Canvas Data 2. You may need to do that on a daily basis since the API and Canvas Data 2 return the last-time something happened and cannot be ran as-needed or you miss out on all of the stuff that happened in between. You might think that you only need the people who haven't logged in for X days, but "log in" is the wrong metric to look at. Logging in might happen infrequently if people don't log out and the browser remembers their session or they're using the mobile app. Checking the time spent in a course or looking for activity in each course is better. Canvas can sometimes show a last activity in a course even though the person did little more than open their mobile app.

The reason you cannot wait until you need it is because you might have those faculty (I know we do) who don't do anything for two weeks and then happen to do something right before you checked. It shows that they were just in doing things, but not that they missed the two weeks before that. I usually get pulled into the situation when there's a problem with an instructor and the Dean wants to know if the instructor has been grading. If I don't collect the data as it happens, then I cannot give the complete picture.

My wife teaches for a school that makes sure teachers are in each course a certain number of times a week and responding to a minimum number of discussion posts. You need to get the data daily in order to track that as the API and Canvas Data 2 just show the last time, not the history. Live Events are notifications sent from Canvas when something happens. Those typically go to an AWS SQS Queue that you then extract the data from (sounds expensive, but for our small institution I spend under $2 a month to track when people do stuff in the course). Live Events are a best effort and may not catch things if the Canvas servers are busy or there are network issues. That means that you really need to use the API to catch anything that Live Events misses if you're going to accuse someone of slacking or taking disciplinary action.  Whether you use the API or Canvas Data 2, you would need to extract that information into a separate table to track the history.

That's just the data gathering portion. Once you have that information, you can determine what logic needs used to match your criteria and programmatically create notifications or create a web-interface that shows the information. 

In other words, it's not a trivial exercise. It's possible, but many people do not have the programmer and database support to make all that happen.

I once wrote (and shared) a program that would gather instructor information using the access report. I had written one that obtains an access report for an entire class and puts it into a single Excel file. Someone asked about the same thing for instructors. It's possible, but it was really slow if you tried to do it for multiple faculty and had issues timing out due to script limitations within the browser. I last updated it 8 years ago and I'm pretty sure it doesn't work anymore because it doesn't since it doesn't try to throttle the connections.

AspirEDU has already done the hard work of putting it all together into Instructor Insight. We've been long-time users of a couple of their products and have been happy with their team and their products.