Canvas Course Analytics For Faculty
Generally, and more importantly as we engage in a fully remote learning experience this term, it is essential to track student engagement as your course runs. Tracking engagement allows you to catch struggling students and implement interventions that help them recover early. Canvas provides course analytics that tracks student participation and engagement in your course. The video below discusses the usage of Canvas Analytics by covering the following topics:
- The 3 main purposes of Canvas course analytics
- How to access read and use available information
- What instructors can track in their Canvas courses
Understanding analytics terminology:
Some terminology in canvas analytics bears explaining.
Page Views
Because the page view data is based on requests to the server, the numbers for page views may be greater than what we traditionally think of as a page view. As a result, page view data should be used as a good approximation to student activity and not an absolute metric. This data is most valuable when seeking to understand if activity did occur, and as a means of comparison across students within a course or when viewing trends week to week.
Participations
Several actions define participation in Canvas and collectively describe events where a user takes an action within a course. We track participations for both students and instructors, and we report participations in Canvas Course Analytics for just student participations.
The following student actions will generate analytics course participation:
- Announcements: posts a new comment to an announcement
- Assignments: submits an assignment
- Collaborations: loads a collaboration to view/edit a document
- Conferences: joins a web conference
- Discussions: posts a new comment to a discussion
- Pages: creates a page
- Quizzes: submits a quiz
- Quizzes: starts taking a quiz
It is helpful to think about analytics as guidelines to determine appropriate interventions rather than hard and fast rules. Compare students with low engagement and participation metrics with top-performing students to see if there is a marked difference in the correlation between engagement and performance. It is all relative.
Analytics generation is a computationally heavy process so you might find from time to time that not all elements on the course analytics page load. If you find that to be the case, reach out to the technology team on the #canvas_faculty_tech_connect (Links to an external site.)slack channel, and we will help resolve any page load issues.