Canvas total activity tracking problem

Question

Hello,

We are experiencing an issue with Canvas activity tracking. Even though our instructor has spent more than 25 hours working in Canvas, the system is not accurately recording the time. It only tracks the first few minutes (around 3 minutes) and then stops unless they manually interact with the screen, such as moving between slides. After they interact, it records a few more minutes and then stops again.

Is anyone else facing this issue, and does anyone know how to fix it?

Thank you very much for your help.

paul_fynn · Accepted Answer

Hi @TareqAli

I have a memory from long ago that Canvas logs time according to keyboard/touchscreen interaction, and that for short breaks the clock keep sticking, but for longer breaks the clock banks the time and starts again at the next interaction. However I can't find the source for that.

Note that most students using the Canvas App never actually logout, so their time would be continuous.

There are still many unknowns around how Canvas usage data is constructed, that mean I would take it with a pinch of salt - one example is that students who access a publicly available course but are not enrolled will leave a trace in deeper parts of Canvas, but not in the Course Analytics.

Chris · Accepted Answer

Hi @TareqAli,

I would agree with @paul_fynn that there are just general challenges around this kind of data.  I think what you're experiencing is the intended behavior, even if it may not fit your exact need.  I would always treat estimates of "time tracking" as educated guesses at best, and just wild speculation at worst…. Here are a couple different scenarios highlighting some of the issues…

If a user loads a page and just sits on it, how should that actually count?  if the user just leaves their computer on and falls asleep, logging all of that time could severely inflate the activity time, so that wouldn't seem right.  On the other hand, if the user is watching a 2 hour lecture video, not counting all of that time is doing to severely underestimate their time, so that's problematic too…

I believe Paul summed up the current functionality pretty well, which tries to be a balance of all the possible scenarios.  I'd really recommend against using that activity data for anything other than some geenral statistics about users (and even then, that would still be flawed).

-Chris