Mobile App Usage Reported in Total Activity

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scain
Community Contributor

In the People page there's a really nice metric of "Total Activity" which shows how much time each student has spent in the course. Obviously, this can't be relied upon too heavily since some students aren't actively spending all that time in the course, but I am interested in a few students' reports. There are several students in this course who have no time listed (which I interpret as meaning that they have not accessed the course at all), but looking at their more detailed individual Access Report it shows that these students have accessed multiple pages in the course. My hypothesis is that this is because they are accessing the course exclusively through the mobile app. Can anyone confirm that the mobile app usage does not get added to the "Total Activity" timer?

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rseilham
Community Champion

From my understanding in past conversations with the Canvas Mobile team and our admins, since mobile is "always" logged in, it's not easy (or possible) to set a timer on their activity, so it's not included in the Total Activity. So, mobile activity (pages viewed, etc) is tracked but time isn't.

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scain
Community Contributor

As closely as  @rseilham ​ has worked with the mobile team at Canvas, I trust him to have the correct information. I think it's safe to take the information he's passed along as being more than a "best guess." Smiley Happy

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rseilham
Community Champion

Deactivated user​ or  @peytoncraighill ​ - Do you have a definitely answer for us? Thanks!

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snugent
Community Champion

 @milesl ‌ we recently had a similar situation. I reviewed the Canvas Student Release Notes (iOS 6.3) which occurred around InstructureCon2018. It states the following about mobile activity. 

The Student app supports reporting mobile page views to Canvas. Canvas admins can track mobile page views in the Page Views section of a student’s User Details page. Each page view in the Student app is assigned a URL that corresponds to a page in the web view of Canvas. Mobile page views are only sent to Canvas from the Student app when a student leaves, or backgrounds, the app.

So apparently the page views can only be seen in the user details report which is only available to Canvas admins. In my test with a dummy student, it appears that the only way instructors can see mobile student activity in course analytics is when a student participates (submits an assignment or posts a discussion) in an activity. This is disappointing because most faculty use the last activity to determine if a student as logged in the course recently. 

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