Calculation of the "Total Activity" for students

[guo848]

Anyone knows how the total activity is calculated for students. Since it's not clear where these numbers are coming from. Preferably if there's a way to calculate them using the data available in the database. 

[dbrace]

Hi @guo848,

The "Total Activity" column of the "People" area of a Canvas course can be a bit of a mystery.

What I can say is that the  How do I use the People page in a course as an ins... - Instructure Community - 667  support article does have an official definition/answer.

Total Activity — allows you to see how long users interact within a course and counts page navigation only. Total activity time is displayed in hours:minutes:seconds. If a user has not yet reached an hour of activity, total activity time is displayed as minutes:seconds. Total Activity records any time spent viewing course content that exceeds two minutes. If the time between a new activity and the last completed activity is under ten minutes, all time between these two events will also be included. Total Activity does not include group activity or page views for videos that do not include intermediate page requests, such as a half-hour recorded lecture. To view specific page views for a student, view the student's course access report.

Depending on the design of the course, the type of content, and an instructor's expectations, I do not find it to be reliable and the same could be said about almost any other website on the Internet.

-Doug

[guo848]

Thank you so much Doug! Do you know if the data from the course access report can be downloaded/retrieved from an API end point? https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Higher-Ed-Users/Obtaining-and-using-Access-Report-data-for-an-ent... I notice a relatively manual way to do it, but it was an old thread.

[dbrace]

Hi @guo848,

You are welcome!

I do not believe it is possible through the API and I am basing that on the reply to another post by @James (the same person in what you shared) at  [ARCHIVED] Can we download User Access Log Report ... - Instructure Community - 416617 .

You might be able to put something together using Canvas Data 2.

-Doug

[James · Accepted solution]

@guo848, the script that downloads the report for the entire class still works, even though it's been out there for a long time. Thankfully, some things in Canvas move slowly.

While the access report is not available through the API, the total activity and last activity numbers are available through the Enrollments API or through GraphQL. Like most things, it is a snapshot at the current time and the numbers are really more helpful if you do daily or weekly recording that allow tracking of it (that allows you to determine that yes, they spent 4 hours in the course but it was all in the first week and they haven't done anything since March 28).

That total activity time and last activity timestamp information is also available in Canvas Data 2 in the enrollments table.

The information in the user access report is not available through the API, Canvas Data 2, or any publicly exposed endpoint. I use Canvas Live Events to send the information to an AWS SQS Queue that I then query and retrieve and can analyze. That's about as close as you can get outside of the built-in user access report. Canvas Live Events is not 100% reliable -- if there's a network issue or server congestion, then the notifications may not get delivered.

[dbrace]

Thank you for your expertise, @James.

-Doug