New Analytics; Time Students Spend in Canvas (on a weekly basis)

MiguelMontanez

Hi,

 

Is there a way to generate the time students spend in Canvas on a weekly basis? The total time is available under the "People" menu; however, I would like to have a summary of time spent and number of logins on a weekly basis. I explored the "New Analytics" report; unfortunately the New Analytics reports do not help me much. Your help is greatly appreciated!

 

Thank you!

ryan_corris

Hey @MiguelMontanez! 

Great question!  I am not familiar with a way to find the specific amount of time a student spends in a course that can be filtered and/or downloaded.  Even if there was the ability to gather this data, the time spent in a course can be deceiving and data can be skewed.  This is also mentioned by @JamesSekcienski in his accepted solution to a similar question in the Community: Total Activity Report.  While it may not be suitable for your needs, you could choose a different metric to identify course participation or interaction.

Two different data points in New Analytics that could be used include Page Views or Participations.  While this may be a little bit of weekly work and require the need for a few spreadsheet skills, you could download a weekly report in New Analytics.  In a separate spreadsheet, you could set up a sheet where you could copy and paste the new data from that week and could make a comparison to the data from the previous week(s).  While this could work, it might start getting messy when students drop or add your course after the spreadsheet is set up. I am definitely not saying this is the best way to do this, but it is an option.

I think a better option that would require very little work to collect the data after being initially set up is to create exit tickets or quick checks throughout your course.  I often create exit tickets in a Canvas quiz and ask  1-3 three questions that can be self graded (even if the grade is not important).  These could be more of a formative assessment to help the instructor gain an understanding of the learning taking place in class or they could be just a quick true/false question where the student self assess whether or not they are "getting it".  This could be a quick visual check in the grade book to see which students have/have not participated to complete the exit tickets. Another option could be to assign each exit ticket a trivial amount of points and compare the points of all the exit tickets to the total amount of points for exit tickets so far in that term.  For example, let's say I have a total of 10 exit tickets for the term and each exit ticket is worth 1 point.  At the midpoint of the term, students should have completed 5 of the 10 exit tickets and should have 5 points.  If they have less than 5 points they have either answered a question incorrectly or have not completed the exit ticket.

If I am collecting data, I try to get the most bang for my buck.  While total amount of time spent in a course may give you some insight, hard evidence can be more insightful and possibly give an instructor some data to help drive instructional decisions.

Hope this helps.  Feel free to reply with questions.