Tracking Changes

[chad_corbett]

As a Canvas Admin, is it possible to #track changes to a course made by the course instructor, such as a file that was posted then later deleted? For example, teacher posts example essay and then later deletes it. (Not "unpublish) Then a Canvas Admin audits course to verify content used.

[kona]

 @chad_corbett , I can’t think of a super easy way to do this in Canvas. I know the info is there in the backend of Canvas, but every time I’ve needed this level of information I’ve gone to Canvas Support - who has always been able to get it for me. 

Kona

[James]

 @chad_corbett 

The first thing that comes to my mind is the Course Audit Log API.

GET /api/v1/audit/course/courses/:course_id

It doesn't include everything, including most user content changes. I double checked and deletion of files is not included.

However, if you are deleting user content, it may show up the list of deleted material that you get when you add /undelete to the end of the primary course URL. It has a date of when it was created and last updated being the time when it was deleted.

Someone else may know of another way, but the way I can think of to track is to download all the course metadata about assignments, files, discussions, content pages, quizzes, etc., on a regular basis and then look for changes that occur. This is especially true for deletions, because many API calls don't return deleted information (including files). So the presence of a file one day and not the next might mean it was deleted (IDs also change when you replace a file, so be careful).

You may need to dig into the user logs to see who was logged in at a particular time and working on the course to tell who did what.

Similar questions have been asked before, including this one from a month ago: Audit/Track Course Content. The solution there was less technical in nature -- contact support and see what they can do.

Edit: I notice that between the time I started this and the time I finished it, the person who suggested contacting support in the message I linked to posted it here, too.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @chad_corbett ,

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie

[ddessauer]

I have a similar need even though I am the sole facilitator of the course. I sometimes want to be able to see what changes I made when. For example a course has been duplicated for a new student cohort intake - I want to ensure none of the content is reverting to an older state (as I am constantly tweaking things in the active units).

So the advice here was of limited help - yes, of course I could contact support every time (not going to do that to them). Unfortunately my account doesn't have the required security privileges to access @James excellent suggestion of the /api/v1/audit/

But I do have another bit of helpful (i hope) advice for others who are in this predicament:

If you go to the [files] tab, you can click on the columns to sort by [Date created] or [Date modified] to see the additions (again no deletions sorry) to the files stored in the Canvas Course.

Clearly this does not help with alterations to text, creation of text only quizzes etc but if (like me) you add a lot of media like images, downloadable work sheets etc - these all do get stored here and will show their dates of creation & most recent modification, and the user who made that modification/upload.