What is the meaning of, or how are students generating "user-generated" links in Canvas LMS

saustin

Good morning, I was attempting to trouble-shoot problems that a student was having with her exam.  To do so, I looked in her URL history and saw that some of the links were "user-generated" as seen in the screen shot below.

How are these created within the LMS?  In this instance, the user-generated links started at about 10:30am and ended about 10:31 am; downloading the .csv file associated with this user and cross-checking against the Canvas Page Views UI, it appears there were 270 instances of this in one minute.   The IP address associated with the "User-Generated" notation belongs to Google Cloud.

I am including screenshots:  the first, shows the beginning of the "User-Generated" URLs at 10:30am, the second, the last of the "User-Generated" URLs at 10:31am.

Additional information is that this user was taking a test with Proctorio.  Thank you so much for any information available.

Chris

Hi @saustin,

That is the user-agent column you're looking at there according to the How do I view the page views for a user in an acco... - Instructure Community - 93  guide..  I believe the "user-generated" entries there refer to a user-generated API token being responsible for the access tow you're looking at.  I don't know enough about Proctorio to know if it would use a user-generated token, though my guess is probably not (installed apps using developer keys should generally be identified as something other than user-generated).  There are a ton of possibilities of what could be going on here...  Could be a screenreader, could be an app like Speechify (which annoyingly directs users to create user-generated tokens), could be something else completely... It's going to be hard to get a definite answer to this, as even though there is a "description" type field for the token, it's just user input, so anyone could type anything they wanted there.  If you have a concern, it's probably something you'd have to have a conversation with the student, though it's going to have to be a delicate conversation in my opinion.

I hope this helps a bit.

-Chris