Gathering Duration Data for How long a Student Spends on an Assignment. Specifically minutes, seconds, and hours.

Olihic15

Hello everyone, I was wondering if there is a way for the Canvas LMS to track the specific amount of time that a student spends on each assignment in a course. I am not referring to page views, I'm referring to gathering the date, time in minutes, seconds, and hours that a student spent working on each assignment in a course.

Under course analytics, access reports, and administration reports, we cannot generate this information in our instance.

If we contact instructure support, is it possible for them to provide this data to us for a student if needed?

Robert

@Olihic15,

To elaborate on @SophJag's question there is no way to determine a measurement for working on an assignment based only on time in Canvas. With the exception of a quiz in Canvas, where there is a start time and finished time, every other assignment is something the student can open, review, save and work on in another document/application, in their head, away from the computer, come back to the document make changes, and finally, when they are done, submit it. Thus the only thing that can be measured, is when they accessed the assignment and then when they submitted it.

Consider the following:
- An assignment that requires a file upload, is done outside of Canvas, can be done with/without Canvas open
- A discussion, where the prompt is saved to a word document, so they student can work on it while reading the assigned text, or review additional source material and citations, saving as they make progress, and then paste the final response into the discussion (reply).
- Finally, a project that might take a week/weeks, and requires sourcing materials, reading those materials, creating and editing a paper. The time writing is not the only time spent, but thinking about this assignment while driving, walking, eating all represents time on an assignment that can not be measured by what happens in Canvas.

Canvas roster (people page) and enrollment (canvas data) information will show time spent in interaction seconds, but this does not represent time spent in the course it represents interactions reviewing content (but not saving content or assignment requirements for offline review) and submitting.