Course Development Status Tracking

[dbalbieran]

Hi friends...I just joined my organization and I wanted to get help on how to get started on developing my course design status check.

What I mean by that is that I wanted to write a report on what's the progress, say on the course

design for Spring 2018. I wanna be able to run a report that shows me the courses, changes to fields ( can be data from the tables or a computed or derived value ), what has been added, and what is missing. 

At the moment, we go back and forth Canvas and a spreadsheet where we have do simultaneous updates. I am pretty sure somebody here has thought of this before. If I can be pointed at the right direction, e.g. how to create my own queries, and access the database to dump the contents, or if someone has made a similar program kindly share. 

Or would there be some collaborative effort here? Like joint development?

Thanks guys! 

[Boekenoogen]

I think this is a great idea. I would add one thing. The reports are pulled from an interactive spreadsheet type item only see by admins. This would allow for custom columns and rows that would be able to be exported in a report. 

[stuart_ryan]

Hi  @dbalbieran ,

I have not seen this done before, though I can certainly see how it would be useful. I would anticipate if others have ventured down this path in the past, they may not have posted about it as it could be rather institution specific. I would anticipate what one institution or school classifies as a definition of progress would be different to another.

If you have Canvas Data enabled, there is a wealth of information in there that you could use to analyse modules, pages, files and so on, within a course. For doing a report, I would generally recommend Canvas Data. While you could (in theory) do the same with APIs, it would be far more resource intensive.

The other option is of course then the APIs, that I do have experience with and I don't see why you couldn't write some scripts to extract the data based on criteria to find out progress.

The big question in my mind would be how you define course design completion. For example, what are the specific metrics such as:

• Would you be looking for a number of modules to be completed
• Would you want certain content to be created and named in a certain way
• Is there a 'programatic template' you could use to classify what is a 'shell' (possibly copied from a template), what is 'in progress' (and by what percentage).

I have often pondered this in the back of my mind, as I think it would be great for our learning design team. However, I have never been able to narrow down what the exact criteria might be (as I have never been able to get a single definition of that).

Would really love to hear your thoughts!

Cheers,
Stuart