Using Canvas Data 1 to find upward trends in usage

[Travis_Carter]

Hello! My institution has just started our Canvas Data journey and we have not quite received the upgrade to CD2. I have installed and successfully run the CLI tool to pull the data down onto my local machine and start pulling data into Power BI for visualization.

We have been tasked by our administration to find upward trends in Canvas Utilization. Whether this be from the student perspective or instructor - it doesn't really matter. We are also doing this will the vast majority of our third party applications as well.

I was hoping to collaborate with the community to see how others may be doing something similar with Canvas Data. What data tables are you using and what picture are you trying to paint. We have been tasked with a very broad objective, so I am curious how the community would leverage the data to tell this story?

[JessicaDeanSVC]

Hi there! I think this is really going to vary based on how your institution uses Canvas to begin with. For instance, at my college, every course each quarter automatically gets a Canvas shell created for it, and the instructors and enrolled students automatically added into it. So if we wanted to show increased Canvas utilization, I would look primarily at the ratio of published courses with activity in them to overall courses created for each term. I would also look at the proportion of enrolled students with activity on their account per quarter. In general, I would look at use of different features over time, looking for things like increases in the use of announcements or quizzes or other aspects, to show that the course and students aren't just there, but they are actually doing things in the courses. 

If you haven't already, consider exploring Admin Analytics, which puts Canvas Data 1 information into a bit more digestible format, which might help you brainstorm potential data points to use!

[nhumphries]

@Travis_Carter Hi Travis, is the below what you are looking for. This tells us how many of each item were created over the lifetime that we have had Canvas