Courses published report

[lmcbain]

How can I report on which courses have been published in a specific time period, in order to monitor if people are hitting publication deadlines?

Ideally I'd like to select the date range and get back a list of those courses.

Is there a report that does this?

Thanks!

[mzimmerman]

Hi @lmcbain 

Unfortunately, the date that a course's status was changed is not something that is recorded in the course record, so it is not somethings that appears in any of the reports that can be generated by Canvas.  

When we were tracking this information back during the height of COVID, I was basically generating a new provisioning report every week and storing it, so that we could compare fro one week to the next which course had been published that week.

[lmcbain]

Thank you. It seems so surprising that this important status information cannot be reported on easily!

Could you give me a bit more detail on how you did your reporting though please?

Was it a courses provisioning report you ran and then you did some kind of look up comparison from week to week on the status column? 

Thanks in advance

[a1222679]

You might be able to build a report using Live Events that'll tell you that.

[lmcbain]

Hi, tell me more...

[a1222679]

I only had very limited experience with LE some years ago.  This is probably the best place to get started; https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.data_service_introduction.html

https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.data_service_canvas_course.html#:~:text=of%20the%20secti...

[lmcbain]

Does anybody know if this report could be generated at intervals with Canvas Data 2.0?  We're yet to start exploring it. 

[a1222679]

You could take periodic snapshots using the Courses table where WORKFLOW_STATE will tell you if it's published ('available') or unpublished ('claimed').  You can add account (school, faculty etc.) and enrolment term details by joining those tables to it if you needed to. 

Remember that there's a 24h lag though.  When we used to run a similar report we used to add the disclaimer that the status of the courses might have changed in the last day.  We now publish courses automatically so don't need this report, although it's interesting to see who might have unpublished their course after it had been automatically published.

[Code-with-Ski · Accepted solution]

@lmcbain 

Have you tried using the Course Audit Log API endpoint?  It looks like when a course is published is one of the events that is reported on with this endpoint.  It also allows you to specify a start date and end date to check between.  

There is the ability to view this data for a single course at a time in the Canvas Admin Tools, but it doesn't look like they provide an option to search an entire account. How do I view course activity for an account?