Robust User Interface

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kmeeusen
Community Champion

Contrary to what appears to be a common belief, not all Canvas admins are computer geeks. Most of us did not need those skills in the prior LMSs we migrated from - everything was done through the UI. Many of us, myself included, are becoming more geeky because those skills are helpful for Canvas admins, but we are not up to speed with the data management skills that appear to be needed for Canvas Data. It would be very nice if the Canvas Data Portal also included a UI to view and download the data files in a format we can easily work with like Excel.

At our campus We are working with an IT person from our state system, and he had difficulty even accessing the text files in that obscure zip format used, and get it into Excel, and still needs to apply the data definitions to create a useful report - and he is a geek.

I know that the Canvas Data Portal was tested in Beta, but I strongly suspect that the beta testers 1) had extra support from Instructure, and we a tad bit more geeky than I am.

My new slogan: "Data for the rest of us!"

That is my question - will there be improvements to the Canvas Data Portal to make it more user friendly for the rest of us?

1 Solution
lfeng
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

Hi James!  Your reply are spot on and I just wanted to add a few updates here -

1) I'm so glad folks here are bringing up the need for a data browser UI - this is something we have been thinking about as well.  As you have highlighted, we are starting with the foundation of giving access to data and from here we have a few directions we want to go: 

  • a) expanding the set of data that is included from Canvas and
  • b) surfacing the data into Canvas. 

For (b), one of the ways we are considering doing this is by creating a data browsing type interface.  We are also looking at common reports and queries that would be useful to provide out of the box.  Finally we think actually the best way to surface data into Canvas is to make it so students and teachers get information as part of the normal flow that they may be doing while doing assignments, quizzes, discussions, etc.

2) Last weekend, we did a load of historical page view (requests) so some schools may not have seen the full history of requests prior to that.  Also, since then we found an issue so we actually plan to rerun it again in the next few days.  We appreciate your patience and will keep the community updated here with the latest.

3) Lastly, we are considering improvements to our current Managed Data (Redshift) offering to enhance access capabilities, among other things.  We welcome input from schools and would like to use this forum to validate our plans.

Thanks again for your interest!

Linda

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