How can an instructor track student activity in a Canvas course?
Answer
In Canvas, you have options to track student activity via Course Analytics, Course Statistics, Student Analytics, and the New Analytics tool. You can view your own interactions with a student, and view a summary of all student interactions on your site. At this time, Canvas analytics does not measure activity on mobile devices.
Canvas Analytics
Canvas analytics should not be used as a basis for determining attendance or participation grades in any way.
The use of Canvas analytics provides a general sense of how your students are interacting with your course materials. The overall picture painted by the analytics can give you a sense of which students are not engaging fully with your course.
- Course Statistics provide basic information on which specific course items are engaging students and which course items could be improved for future use to better encourage student engagement.
- Course Analytics enables you to view analytics for the entire course as a whole, in addition to individual student information. Course Analytics are divided into four sections: Activity, Submissions, Grades, and Student Analytics. Canvas's Student Analytics combined with a Course Access Report.
- New Analytics offers an updated, more user-friendly interface for getting analytics about your course and comparing a single student's participation and grades with the class average. We strongly recommend using this tool because it is both more user-friendly and includes data from the Canvas mobile app and mobile web browsers. You can also send a message to all students based on specific course criteria or specific course participation criteria. Alternatively, you can message individual students based on these criteria if that is preferred. To enable it in your course, navigate to course settings, select the Feature Options tab, and then toggle the "New Course and User Analytics" option on. For more use cases that this tool can help with, see What is New Analytics?. To learn more about using this tool, see Canvas's New Analytics resources.
- Student Access Reports & User Page Views provide a condensed version of our Basic FSU Activity Report so that you can get specific information about how particular students are interacting with your course site.