What is "participation"?

[dhagood]

Pulling course-level participation data, using the GET /api/v1/courses/:course_id/analytics/activity API call, returns both "participations" and "views" hash keys.

However, I'm not clear on what each of these objects counts. The API description says:

Returns page view hits and participation numbers grouped by day through the entire history of the course. Page views is returned as a hash, where the hash keys are dates in the format “YYYY-MM-DD”. The page_views result set includes page views broken out by access category. Participations is returned as an array of dates in the format “YYYY-MM-DD”.

This makes me think that the "views" hash key returns how many time a page was viewed on a given day. But, this must be different than participation. What is the participations hash key counting?

[stuart_ryan · Accepted solution]

Howdy dhagood,

I have done a bit of sleuthing around and found that  @kona  pulled this information together in https://community.canvaslms.com/thread/10940#comment-62845 that I think would cover this off (I have copied her response below).

The participation score would be generated as a result of these activities (from my understanding).

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Stuart

From this guideHow do I view Course Analytics? - it appears that [participation] depends on which type of course content you're looking at.

The following user actions will generate analytics course participation:

• Announcements: posts an announcement (instructor)
• Announcements: posts a new comment to an announcement
• Assignments: updates an assignment's settings or description (instructor)
• Assignments: submits an assignment (student)
• Collaborations: loads a collaboration to view/edit a document
• Conferences: joins a web conference
• Discussions: posts a new comment to a discussion
• Pages: creates a wiki page
• Quizzes: submits a quiz (student)
• Quizzes: starts taking a quiz (student)Calendar: updates a calendar event's settings or description (instructor)

[dhagood]

The definition of participations for course-level participations is helpful, thanks  @stuart_ryan ‌.

I have a follow-up question regarding pulling student-level participations using GET /api/v1/courses/:course_id/analytics/users/:student_id/activity. The participations object returns times and paths:

"participations": [    {      "created_at": "2012-01-21T22:00:00-06:00",      "url": "https://canvas.example.com/path/to/canvas",    },    {      "created_at": "2012-01-27T22:00:00-06:00",      "url": "https://canvas.example.com/path/to/canvas",    }  ]

However, only paths to quiz pages are returned. This seems to suggest that navigating through the website (e.g. landing on the home page) are not returned as pages. I'm wondering, are only pages that would generate a participation recorded here?

I ask because I need a way to get student-level details on when any/all pages are accessed.