Viewing Student Access of Files

[sross2]

I want to see if students are downloading a file/course reading. This is useful when talking to students about comprehension (e.g., being able to tell them they scored poorly on something because they didn't read an article or did' look at a review sheet). Does Canvas allow this?

[kona · Accepted solution]

 @sross2 , You can view an access report for an individual student to see what they've accessed - How do I view the course access report for an individual user?  If you'd like to view the access report for your entire course you can use this - Obtaining and using Access Report data for an entire course‌. Or, if you'd like a way for you to track what students have clicked on from Modules and allow your students to track what they've done as well you could try the following - Help Students Monitor their Course Progress‌.

Hope all of this helps!

[JamesAshby]

 @kona ‌ I was doing some testing today and it appears that when a student views a file through the Modules tool using the Canvas Student app, the access report won't register it: it will still look like the student never viewed the file. Is there a way for an instructor to really tell if a student viewed a file or not, regardless of whether they went through the browser or a mobile app?

[kona · Accepted solution]

Good question! I’m tagging  @rseilham ‌ and  @KristinL ‌ (our Community mobile experts) on this to see if they can help. 

[rseilham]

538b2fa8965d0a35076d47b01ee0a336c344953e342c21c84755df3fb83de749‌,

You are correct, this doesn't show up in the access report yet. Just this week, Page views started to roll out in the activity report and other items are going to be coming in the future. So, everything isn't there yet, but will be eventually. This is request that has been worked on for nearly two years, so your timing on this questions is quite timely. Check it out and stay tuned...

[JamesAshby]

Thanks  @rseilham ‌ and  @kona ‌! That's good to know. 

[rseilham]

538b2fa8965d0a35076d47b01ee0a336c344953e342c21c84755df3fb83de749‌, 

A little more information is here as it was mentioned at InstructureCon last week:

https://community.canvaslms.com/community/instcon/instructurecon-2018/blog/2018/07/26/instcon18-prod... 

[JamesAshby · Accepted solution]

Thanks for sharing,  @rseilham ‌! I saw that at the conference. It's very good news. I have a question, though. The release notes that announce that are dated 7-23. But I did some testing and saw entries from using the student app in the User Details "Page Views" area before then (7-16), and I found entires in the requests table reference student app usage before 7-23 too (I think the entries were dated 6-30). Was that because the logging was working for a little while before you announced it in the 7-23 release notes? If so, how long? Or was it just that the student app logging was improved in some way? Thanks!

[rseilham]

538b2fa8965d0a35076d47b01ee0a336c344953e342c21c84755df3fb83de749‌, 

So this took me some time to get my head around, but I think I figured it out after some conversations with the Canvas Mobile team. Mobile page views have been collected in Canvas data for a long while, but you really had to know what you were looking for to find any information. 

In 2017, the mobile activity was added to the Page Views under the User Details for admins (or people with the correct permissions). https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-11052-canvas-production-release-notes-2017-05-13#jive_conte... 

Problem was, it was a mess of api calls and really hard to figure out what the user was actually doing. Essentially the data was noisy. 

The change that was just announced cleans up this area and the CSV (and probably the Canvas Data) to make it much easier to figure out what the user was doing by using a familiar URL structure and less API calls being logged.

For instance, this is before the recent changes.

And after...

It's much easier to read this data. 

Does that make sense? Hope this helps. 

[JamesAshby]

Thanks so much, Ryan. That helps a lot!