Analytics for individual URL links on page...How do I know if student has accessed the link?

[wade1]

Is this possible?

I want to have 10 URL for students to review, put on one page...how can I tell if they accessed the links?

thanks

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hello  @wade1 ​...

I don't think there is anything built-in to Canvas where if a student were to click on a link that you created in a Canvas course page that it would register as a "click" in a report.  I tried this in my own sandbox course, and I couldn't really find anything similar to what you were asking.  The best thing that I could recommend would be to make a separate Module in your course and then make links using the "External URL" option when adding new items to your Module.  I know this is not what you were probably hoping for, but this way you'd be able to actually see what students are clicking on the links that you want them to visit.  To view access reports, you would go to the "People" page of your course, and then click on the name of a student.  Then, you would click on the "Access Report" button on the right side of the screen.  Look for the item name of the link that you created within your Module, and you'll see a number next to it which represents the number of times viewed...along with the last time the link was accessed by a given student.

Hope this helps, Michael!

[wade1]

Thanks--love the community!

[James]

 @wade1 ​,

I almost wrote what  @Chris_Hofer  did, but I was hoping I was wrong about it and someone had a solution. Within Canvas itself, that's probably the best / only way I know of.

The one thing I thought of -- although it abhors me to even think about it -- is to use some kind of redirection or tracking tool.

For a redirection tool, all of your links go to another site which registers that they came in, and then sends them on to another location. The problem with that is that the links wouldn't be unique to let the tracking site know which user was visiting the page.

Another way to do the tracking is by adding JavaScript to the links to do the tracking.

Google does this by adding an onmousedown() function to each link they return. It sends some codes that they use to track which links are clicked on. Most people probably don't realize it, but when you click a link on Google, you don't just go directly to the link, but you send information about that to Google before you do.

So, if you were a Canvas Admin and wanted to add this to a sub-account, you could write code that would look for any anchor tag with an external href on a page and the modify it by adding an onmousedown= function that would call another function that would do a post to a server that would collect statistics about who visited the site.

You can get the link from the JavaScript this object and the document contains the Canvas User ID and the name of the current user in the ENV variable.

You would want to make sure that whatever system you were using for tracking the information had good availability, but if the code was written right, then failure of that host wouldn't break the link. Basically, you make the AJAX post to the website and then immediately return back to the page so the browser will follow the link.

It's the fact that someone is tracking me that causes me to shudder and I would go to lengths to disable that feature if I saw it was happening and I would probably write a rule for my adblocker add-on if it didn't already pick it up. On the other hand, as a teacher, I could see where it would be useful, but from what I've seen through the Access Report Data and the number of links that are module items, the number of students following through is so small that it would probably just frustrate me more to know how bad it is.

[wade1]

Thank you taking the time to provide this information...we are switching over to Canvas in January 2017 from 15 years on Blackboard...trying to find areas that we take for granted in BB and just aren't in Canvas yet...

Have a great Day!

[Stef_retired]

 @wade1 , like you, our school transitioned from BB (actually, a BB predecessor) and perhaps the only feature I miss is the robust user and item statistics that were available to every teacher. You might be interested in adding a description of your use case to which is currently open for voting. I'm not sure the feature idea, as proposed, exactly addresses what you're after--which is to say, even if one could view access by file or item, that doesn't imply that one could also track views by URL--but I do think that its implementation would go a long way toward allowing us to come up with a design that would allow us to track URL views.

[wade1]

Thank you SO MUCH! I have voted!

[wade1]

Everyone is so helpful...I was told and found the voting on such a suggestion!

thanks again!