What is a "participation"?

[cliff_cunningha]

In "View Course Analytics"... what counts towards "Participations"?

[tim_kato]

Hi  @cliff_cunningha ‌ - please see https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10299-how-do-i-view-course-analytics  for a complete list of items that constitute a "participation"

[cliff_cunningha]

Hmmm... well, I did see that paragraph that reads as follows:

So, the "Participations" column, in course analytics, should includes Assignment submissions.

If that is true, what am I to make of this?

This is a screenshot for a course of ours from last fall (randomly selected).

If counted Partcipations are supposed to include submissions... how can the Submissions column be larger than the Participations column?

[James]

 @cliff_cunningha  

There have been some lengthy discussions here about the inconsistencies in the data and just what each thing means exactly. Normally there is no good resolution because of the way that data was collected. For a while, mobile app data wasn't getting collected in there. Analytics is being done away with in favor of New Analytics and somewhere part of the discussion around that mentioned the difficulties in making the data match.

• Analytics Page Views and Participations 
• New vs. Old Analytics 
• Canvas Data Requests count vs. Canvas Analytics Page Views (long thread -- in particular, read comments by Kevin Turco from June 2019)
• Analytics 2: Participation Measures 

I cannot find the particular thread I'm looking for. It might have been related to Canvas Data, but it was a blog post by an Instructure employee about what they were doing with analytics.

Some of the threads I looked at mentioned LTI (external tools) making submissions that would not be counted as participations. If that's the case, then that alone could explain why your submission count was higher than the participation count.

What you're seeing may also be related to this known issue: Missing participation data in course analytics/page views . The example there is that 8 submissions were reported but only 6 participations.

There is also a different list of what counts as a participation in the Canvas Guides:  How do I view analytics for a student in a course?