Data for Public Courses

[AdrienneScott]

Hello, 

Is new analytics available in public courses? I have it enabled and it doesn't seem to be collected data? If NA is not available for public courses, is there a means to get Course Activity like page views? 

Thanks

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi @AdrienneScott ...

Sorry for the dumb question, but are there folks enrolled in these public courses so that analytics can be generated for those people?

[ColtonSwapp · Accepted solution]

Hello @AdrienneScott 

You should be able to use New Analytics in public courses. A couple things about new analytics: 

1. In order for new Analytics to work, the students must be enrolled in the course. Only active and completed student enrollments are included in data for New Analytics. Deleted or inactive user enrollments will not generate data.
2. With New Analytics, Data is refreshed in New Analytics every 24 hours. So if you are not seeing any data there, it could be that it has not refreshed. 

Hopefully this helps! 

-Colton

[kylecage0]

So you can use New Analytics in a public course, but New Analytics only works if users are enrolled in the course? It seems like enrolling users in the course would defeat the purpose of a public course. Understanding that the usage data would be limited without enrollments, it would still be helpful to have some basic stats for public courses, like page views. We were considering using a public course for student resources but if there’s no data available to track usage, we would be better off building a website instead. 

[StanFreeda]

Did you ever get an answer to this question?  I would be interested in tracking public courses in some way, too.

[Sylvia_Ami]

@StanFreeda The answer was - New Analytics only reports the activity by enrolled "students." So if you have a Public course, you won't get any data.

However, I've been able to get some data for my Public course using (old) Analytics. View the Analytics Table to see the number of Page Views by date. This is helpful because it shows individual dates and not a weekly total. Go to the Canvas Guide  How do I view Course Analytics? and jump down to the View Table Data section for more information.

*There is one caveat with this data - it includes page views by the people editing the contents. So if you have an idea how many page views you had in the course, deduct that from the data.