[ARCHIVED] New Analytics Reports for Courses with Large Enrollments

[AmalShah]

Hello Fellow Admins:

With the shift to remote online instruction being here to stay for the foreseeable future, many of our university administrative departments (e.g. Human Resources, Dean of Students, Environmental Health and Safety, Public Safety, etc.) are looking to utilize Canvas to create orientation and/or non-credit training courses aimed at either just faculty, just students, or just staff. Our largest population (not surprisingly) are students, so courses with all of the students enrolled number in the tens of thousands.

We've been able to create a handful of courses with massive enrollments (re: ~13,000 students) without too many issues, except for the Gradebook loading slowly (as expected, but not too big of an issue so as long as it loads and we can export it) and with New Analytics not generating reports. We found that courses with massive enrollments did not allow us to export the "Missing Assignments", "Late Assignments", "Excused Assignments", "Class Roster", and "Course Activity" reports from the New Analytics feature. We reached out to Canvas about this and their response was: "The majority of Canvas courses carry a course weight of less than 50,000 (students x assignments). Any courses with a higher course weight are not currently supported." And, of course, these courses went beyond the course weight limit of 50,000.

We understand that Canvas wasn't designed to support massive courses such as these, however, we are also in a unique situation (like many others) where orientations, trainings, etc. which used to run face-to-face must now run online.

If possible, we would like to avoid splitting the courses up and in the interim we've asked the Teachers for these courses to export the Gradebook and manipulate the Excel (csv) file to check for missing assignments (the largest concern was for which students missed an assignment). 

By posting here, I was hoping to crowd source some ideas from fellow Canvas Admins, who are in a similar situation, to see how you may have handled these kinds of courses. Any ideas or pro-tips would greatly be appreciated!

Thanks so much!