Is there a report in Canvas that shows student Last Participation in real time?

[EvanDonovan]

Is there a report in Canvas that shows student Last Participation in real time?

I learned today that New Analytics is delayed by 24 hours. We would like to have a way to check on this in real time because we need to know the accurate information when we are administratively dropping a student for non-attendance.

We have to set the correct date to use as the Last Date of Attendance for US Department of Education reporting purposes.

[jerry_nguyen]

@EvanDonovan 

You can get this data through Canvas API via this endpoint https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/analytics.html#method.analytics_api.student_in_course_partici... this endpoint will show you the number of activities (E.g. page views) every hour and also the last time a student submit an assignment or quiz (However, it's not real-time, I think it gets updated every 15 to 30 minutes)

If you simply need to know the last time they open a particular course (And/or viewing a page within the course) then you can get it through Canvas GraphQL (Playground is available here https://yourinsitution.instructure.com/graphiql) with the following query:

query MyQuery {
  legacyNode(_id: "*Canvas User ID*", type: User) {
    ... on User {
      email
      enrollments(courseId: "*Canvas Course ID") {
        lastActivityAt
      }
      name
    }
  }
}

[EvanDonovan]

Thanks - I was hoping that there was something accessible to end users since we would be wanting to run this on a regular basis. But if it's exposed through the API, maybe there is someone who's developed an integration that would do it.

Regarding the "participations" defined on the Analytics API page, would those include viewing pages in the course, or only participation in discussions, assignments, and quizzes? For the purpose of taking attendance for USDE, we would only be able to count participation in discussion, assignments, and quizzes.

[jerry_nguyen]

@EvanDonovan 

You can create a web portal (which is accessible anywhere) or a simple Excel spreadsheet (using VBA code) to display the data. 

The  "user-in-a-course-level participation data" endpoint includes both page views by hours and last participation activity (E.g. quiz/assignment submission, etc.) 

[jerry_nguyen]

@EvanDonovan 

You can create a web portal (which is accessible anywhere) or a simple Excel spreadsheet (using VBA code) to display the data. 

The  "user-in-a-course-level participation data" endpoint includes both page views by hours and last participation activity (E.g. quiz/assignment submission, etc.) 

[EvanDonovan]

Thanks - yes, that would be useful. Do you know of any already-developed integrations like that, or would we need to do that ourselves? It seems like this could be useful for many people potentially, who need attendance data that is more recent.

[jerry_nguyen · Accepted solution]

@EvanDonovan 

I'm not aware of any off-the-shelf integration. There is an LTI called "Dropout Detective" that you might want to take a look but I'm not sure if the data shown is in real-time.

However, if you need any assistance building it yourself then send me a private message and we can discuss it. 

[EvanDonovan]

Hi Jerry,

Thanks for the offer! This is something we may consider at some point, particularly if we could do one that would automatically integrate with our SIS, Populi. Populi also has an API to set last attendance dates, which would enable the reports that we had previously done on students' attendance to work as before.

This is our first term using Canvas, and we are actually using Dropout Detective right now. We think it will be useful for determining which students are at-risk, but we just wanted something that had up-to-the-minute (or at least hour) date on last participations for when people drop so that we can ensure they are correct for the US Department of Education.

Dropout Detective does its own reporting in a batch process every night at 12:01am, whereas, for us at least, New Analytics does its reporting at around 2pm or so Eastern.

I am a little surprised Canvas analytics didn't provide that out of the box, since Moodle did. Perhaps it is because it is a hosted solution and it cuts down on server load to do it this way.