How to find which Collaboration tool was used (specifically EtherPad)?

[mlewis23]

With the end of life of EtherPad, I'd like to find a list of instructors that have been using it so we can reach out to them.  I don't see that information in the Collaborative API (Canvas LMS REST API Documentation).  Anyone know where/if this information can be found?

[scottdennis]

Just FYI; If you are using Etherpad in Canvas, please see the Canvas Production Release Notes (2015-05-16)  for an important update on the plan to discontinue the use of Etherpad integration in Canvas as of August 8th.

[mlewis23]

The release notes explain why Etherpad is going away, but that wasn't my question.  I'm wanting to know how to find which of our users have used Etherpad so we can make contact with them and let them know about alternatives.

[scottdennis]

Hi Matt,

Sorry I don't have an answer for your question.  I don't have any idea how to go about finding that information.  I just wanted to warn anyone who hadn't see the release note entry about Ethernet being removed from Canvas for security reasons.

[lalevesque]

Hi Matt,

We had a similar situation recently where our K-12 admins wanted to know what students were using/viewing Etherpads and what the addresses of the Etherpads were. Since there is/was no administration tools for Etherpad, this presented a unique problem.

What we came up with was a python script to crawl through all Student users' page views for the last 90 days looking for any page view with 'etherpad' in the name. We used this call to retrieve them:

GET /api/v1/users/:user_id/page_views

This netted us about 10 different etherpads we were unaware of and mostly answered the question.

Now that we're involved in the Hosted Data Beta program, we're able to look at page views from around 1 year ago and see etherpads visited since then.

Hopefully that sheds some light on this issue.

[mlewis23]

lalevesque​, thanks for looking into this issue.  What are you looking at in the page view return?  Since Etherpad is an external tool, I thought the url could only tell you when someone went to the Collaboration page not if they clicked an Etherpad link. Since Etherpad is nolonger available I'm unable to make a quick test of this, but with Google Dive, the url looks like "https://ewu.instructure.com/courses/834960/collaborations/34992 ". Does this look different than if Etherpad was used instead of Drive?

Yesterday I noticed in the Student Activity report that external tools come up in the 'content type' filed at 'context', and the name of the tool comes up in the 'content' filed.  At least this is what it looked liked.  I have yet to try and hunt for someone that used Etherpad.

[mlewis23]

It looks to me like the 'content' filed in Student Activity report is not going to show Etherpad.  It looks like it is showing LTI integration tools (interesting and useful, but not helpful for Etherpad).  I'm guessing since Etherpad is linked from within a regular Canvas page it is not going to show in the activity report.

[stuart_ryan]

Hi  @mlewis23 ,

I am going through having a look at some of the early days in the Canvas Developers group, and checking in to see if older enquiries have been answered. I also noticed there hasn’t been any discussion on this question in quite some time.

I am wondering, were you ever able to resolve this?

I will mark this as assumed answered for the time being, however, by all means please let us know if you still have an outstanding question and we will take a peek!

Cheers,
Stuart