How can I get specific students' activity streams from the API?

cassidy_vela

We are currently using the user in a course level participation data report we created with our data warehouse to highlight students who haven't participated in a certain amount of time. The Registrar then checks each of those marked students to check if they at least viewed a course page or assignment more recently, since that counts toward our definition of attendance.

We would like to automate this process further and include the most recent page view data and dates for each student so our report can have an accurate definition of attendance from Canvas, not just the participations.

The only API call I can find that has this data and not only a level of page views with no other information on which pages they viewed is the https://rm.instructure.com/api/v1/users/activity_stream, but this only grabs the authenticated user's activity stream. Is there any way to extract every student's activity stream data?

We have not used Canvas Data and don't know how to get started there, would that have a solution to this? Thank you.

Jeff_F

@cassidy_vela

If you need reliable attendance or page view data at scale, Canvas Data 2 is the correct solution. In CD2, detailed interaction data lives primarily in the web_logs table, which replaces the old requests table from Canvas Data 1 and records timestamped web activity across Canvas. When joined with the pseudonym table, you can resolve institutional identifiers such as SIS user ID, login ID, and integration ID so reports align cleanly with registrar and compliance systems.

For course level engagement signals, both Canvas Data and the Enrollments API expose the last_activity_at field in the enrollment record, which serves as a lightweight indicator of a student’s most recent activity within a course. Coursework based activity can also be incorporated by querying the submissions table and calculating a MAX(submitted_at) or MAX(graded_at) value per student, allowing web access, enrollment activity, and submission activity to be evaluated together when determining attendance or recent participation. These values are consistent with the activity indicators instructors and administrators see in the Canvas UI, which helps ensure alignment between automated reports and what users observe directly in the system.