Has a student ever logged into Canvas

[JonathanAdams]

We are attempting to track and email students based on whether or not they have ever logged into Canvas.  This process is set to reside on our SIS and would like to be able to query Canvas for this data. Is this possible?  Our SIS is Ellucian Banner which is Oracle Based on a Linux OS.

Thanks in advance

Jonathan

[greydon]

Hello @JonathanAdams 

Thank you for contacting Canvas Support. We're sorry to hear you've been experiencing issues with tracking a student's login history in Canvas. This is attainable by using the Admin icon on your left navigation. Then, go to the people tab and search for the student. Once you are viewing their page, we will display all of their movements on Canvas including attempted logins. You can even download the report to generate a csv file which will include IP information, etc.

If you still need assistance and because of the concerns for privacy, it would be best if you contacted Canvas Support directly to pinpoint the source of the issue and provide a resolution:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Basics-Guide/How-do-I-contact-Canvas-Support/ta-p/389767 

[JonathanAdams]

We would like to do this in a nightly process logging in, clicking around, and downloading is not feasible.  Is there a way to automate?  Query for a student from an external system to get attributes of a student to include last login, or never logged in?

[Ron_Bowman]

@JonathanAdams -

I thought that was what your intent was in the original question and that Instructure's answer while correct in a way was not what you wanted.

My guess is that yes it can be done by writing a a script of some sort and using API's - there are people on the forum that would know definitively if this is somewhat easily done.

the api documentation is found here

Sorry that I can't be much more help than that

[melodyc_lam]

Hi! I actually am running a Python script to automate a similar process (we want to know how many logins we're seeing at each school and on what days to see trends), so I know it can be done.

If you just want users with 0 activity, there's a report for that -- it's called "zero_activity_csv" and you can call it from this endpoint:

https://<canvas>/api/v1/accounts/1/reports/zero_activity_csv

See more info here: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/all_resources.html#method.account_reports.create

This endpoint for running reports I believe can accept any report that you can run from the UI, you just need to know the name of the report.

You can grab the last login for a student using this endpoint:

https://<canvas>/api/v1/accounts/:account_id/users?include[]=last_login

See more info here: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/users.html#method.users.api_index

If you need full login details, you can try

https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/authentications_log.html#method.authentication_audit_api.for_...

to retrieve all logins for a user.

I'm not familiar with your SIS so I don't know if these will work via the SIS, but as long as your SIS can do HTTP get requests it can be done. Otherwise, you can script using any language you like and make it a cron job/task scheduler job.

Good luck!