Treat LTI Launch as a Participation

[paul_fynn]

The absence of LTI based participation from both New Analytics and Admin Analytics is pretty much a showstopper for courses that make intensive use of New Quizzes and other integrations. The result is to substantially underreport student activity.

As an interim measure, could Canvas find/implement a mechanism which allows either

• An LTI based activity to trigger a participation record instead of a page view for every launch OR
• An LTI based activity to trigger a participation record for the FIRST launch

There may be LIT categories that we may wish to exclude.

[chriscas]

Hi @paul_fynn,

As a Canvas admin for my institution, I would agree that extensive use of LTI tools can make activity harder to track in those courses.  Some LTI providers do have their own analytics system, but it's very messy to have to collect all of that data.  I know some schools attempt to create a central learning record store and data from every source possible into it, and then create their own dashboards and reports.  We're a mid-size public university, so that's really not an option for us with our staffing and budget, but it may be something you could look in to.

With all that being said, I would unfortunately be very much against counting an LTI launch as participation in our data.  At least in the US, participation has a somewhat narrow definition for the federal government reporting, and just viewing something in a course unfortunately does not count.  For something to count as participation online, the student basically needs to make some kind of submission (discussion post, assignment submission, quiz, etc).  While some LTI tools do have submissions, there are many that are just for content delivery.

The new analytics attendance feature does let institution admins define what counts as attendance, so maybe we need something similar for participation which could be used in New Analytics, Admin Analytics, and other areas of Canvas (like the green participation checkmarks in the user page view history).  With my coding hat on, I realize the amount of complexity that would add to all of these areas and reports though, and it really may not be feasible for Instructure to do.

Hopefully someone form Instructure will be willing to comment on this from their perspective.

-Chris

[DecoyLex]

For what it's worth, Canvas does have some mechanism for tools to post interaction data back to the LMS using xAPI. However, I've never actually seen any tools that implement it, and it's not clear whether that'd count as an interaction or if it'd just log time in the student's Total Activity counter.

[paul_fynn]

Thanks DecoyLex - could you expand on that a little please; we are comfortable looking around the RESTAPI documentation and that's not something that we have come across.

Certainly that was the point of Tin Can - to report event data ....

Sorry - just spotted the link - I guess the challenge here would be to get iParadigms and other LTi suppliers to code their end in - or is it already coded in and not being picked up on the Canvas side ?

[DecoyLex]

My understanding is that the tools need to actually post this data to Canvas; all that Canvas has implemented is a way for tools to report that interaction data as page views.

It's pretty safe to assume that a tool doesn't use this endpoint if you can't find a custom field (in the tool settings for LTI 1.1, or developer key settings for LTI 1.3) that uses the $Canvas.xapi.url substitution.

Unfortunately, digging into the code for Canvas, it looks like only a page view event is posted, and tools can't log these views as participations even though xAPI differentiates between seeing content and interacting with content. For a page view to count as participation, the participated field on the page view needs to be set to true [application_controller.rb:1669]. However, when the LTI::AnalyticsService creates a new PageView, participated is not set [analytics_service.rb:55].

[paul_fynn]

Thanks, that's very helpful. The problem here is that we have at least one provider (working through API) who isn't prepared to go through all the hoops required to get the authorisations required from institutions to effectively be given the authority to change the institutions' gradebook. (in the context of passing back a result) 

I think on that basis the buck goes back to Instructure to find a way that would allow institutions to opt in or out of an xAPI event push (or an API grade push) so that data pushes are effectively 'authorised' at that point.

Interesting that your federal requirement is for 'participations'; I guess the parallel in the UK is our HESA returns which take the final assessment as the last date of attendance, but in terms of useful learning analytics/engagement I think that clicks are just vanity numbers and participations are the gold standard.

[ProfessorBeyrer]

Thank you all for this discussion. It makes it especially challenging for our financial aid departments to track down date of last attendance for online classes (following the federal guidelines mentioned by @chriscas). When a student is dropped from a class their financial aid is prorated to the date of last participation, which means a deep dive into each course via the browser for the instructor (or likely the sysadmin) to look for the most recent academically relevant participation. Ugh!

[carlycurran · Accepted solution]

Thanks, all, for the details on this! I'm taking both of these things into account for discovery:

- how to represent LTI tool use when looking at student participation
- how to make financial aid reporting easier 

[SHEBENE]

If, during this discover phase, you could get to a point that LTI assignments trigger the "new" gradebook features that are triggered when an assignment is submitted. That would be amazing!

[IanGoh]

we're currently going down the path of Canvas Data 2 for financial compliance reporting.  Looking at data points like:

• enrollments.last_activity_at
• submissions.submitted_at (for assignments and classic quizzes)
• and perhaps discussion activity (still researching).