Improve Access Report Feature

[brippberger]

I am an instructor.

The Access Report feature is the only way for a teacher to see whether a student has accessed a particular item on Canvas. However, this feature has two big problems. Well, it has one gigantic glaring problem that renders it useless, and one frustrating problem. 

Big Giant Problem: it isn't accurate. I cannot use it to get an accurate view of whether my students have accessed a particular item. 

Frustrating Problem: It's hard to use because you cannot navigate between students while in this view. 

1. (Big Giant Problem) I used the access report to see whether students have accessed the lecture, and to send a reminder email to those who have not, so that they don't fall behind. 

2 students emailed me to say that they had watched the lecture. I double checked. Their access report said nothing about it. 

I opened a chat link and waited 2 hours. 

The chat person looked into it, and after looking at Page Views (which I cannot access) they said that the student was correct, they had accessed the page. When I asked why it didn't show up where I could see it, the chat support person said, "The access report is only a limited amount of views I believe"

When I asked if there was a way to ensure that it showed at least one view of each distinct page, the chat person said "No that isn't possible. It's based on the students navigation"

When I asked if there was another way for a teacher to access whether a student had viewed a particular item, they said, "Page views is the most accurate and it is an admin tool"

So the upshot is that if I want an accurate report of whether my students are accessing my lecture, I have to ask admin to verify 5-10 student's access, every week. I have no way of doing so myself.

To put it in the most mild terms, that seems like it could be improved. 

2. (Frustrating Problem) You have to navigate back two pages to the Class Roster in order to move to the next student. This makes it take way more time than it should to check all the students' access. 

[Stef_retired]

@brippberger 

Thanks for sharing these ideas, and we apologize for the frustrating experience. We think your feedback will fit well into one or both of these existing conversations, so please consider joining the discussions at Student Activity Report: Student Time Log and See which students have viewed a particular page or activity and when. We've archived this one to remove the duplication and keep those conversations unified.

In the meantime, many teachers use Modules to govern course progression and embed their videos in a page with a 'View the item' or 'Mark as done requirement' in the module progression before proceeding. That solution eliminates the need for emails from students or additional verification on the instructor's part. How do I add requirements to a module?  provides details.

Hope that helps.

[brippberger]

It does not.

I already have "view the item" requirements.

Without being able to see the time someone has spent, "view the item" is useless. You know it's useless. That's why there are seven pages of comments on the other thread. C'mon now, if the solution was as easy as that, I'd have done it. The fact is that Canvas is giving instructors inaccurate data in the Access Report, and this is a problem PHILOSOPHICALLY even if I were able to track their usage another way. Which, honestly, I'd rather do, because the Access Report is a pain.

Canvas support made a big deal about telling me it isn't inaccurate, it's "limited." But those things are scientifically indistinguishable. If only parts of a data pool are shown, and there is no way to know which parts of the data are left out, the data becomes useless. 

The fact that the canvas support had that response ready at their fingertips leads me to believe y'all know that this is a problem. So why are you trying to spin it?

[brippberger]

In addition, it is insulting and condescending to tell me that you've essentially trashed my thread by linking me to a thread asking for the same thing 

from. 5. years. ago. 

You don't care. It's very apparent. Looking though that thread, over and over, canvas representatives say things like "we value your feedback" and "we're very proud of the collaboration" but this is a basic feature and you haven't bothered to implement it 

for. 5. years.

It is so hard for students who never wanted to take an online class to succeed. And you've crippled a teacher's ability to pinpoint problems and suggest where a student needs to pay more attention. Your platform has made my plans to proactively help my students stay on track basically untenable. They're going to flail around, they're going to think they're doing the right things, and I won't be able to show them where they're going wrong, and they're going to fail. 

And you don't care.

[Stef_retired]

@brippberger 

We apologize that you feel that we do not appreciate your feedback and comments; we do. Every single idea that comes to this forum is reviewed, and every idea that is in the Open for Conversation stage is reviewed regularly by our product teams, whether it was shared last week or several years ago.

The Community Team is also tasked with keeping these conversations unified, and from time to time that means we will be moving what turns out to be a duplicate to an ongoing conversation.

The Idea Conversations forum is the one publicly visible place where conversations around requests for enhancements to features take place, but it is not the only way that Instructure receives feedback from our customers. We hope you will read through What is the feature development process for Instructure products?  and ask your local Canvas admin to advocate with your school CSM on your behalf.

Last, although the ideas to which we requested that you add your comments are not new, a considerable amount of development has been completed in the interim, and we encourage you to have a look through the New Analytics User Group to learn more about what has been developed and what is still in the works.

[brippberger]

That's like telling me "We know our car doesn't have seat belts, but look at this great interface for playing your music!" I don't care how much development you've done if you can't get a very simple, basic, fundamental feature in place in 5 years. This is not a bell or a whistle. This is a fundamental piece of how online teachers keep students on track. 

The fact remains that Canvas has, for five years, considered it unimportant to allow teacher to check on how students are accessing their classes, and that when they do give them some insight, that insight is inaccurate and therefore useless. 

I don't see how you can justify giving teachers inaccurate data by saying "look at all the other stuff we've developed!" 

Your New Analytics link contains nothing about this. What did you think, on that page, would be helpful or comforting to me? I'm genuinely curious. I have been specifically told by Canvas support that there's no way to do what I need to do. Did I miss something that tells me that this is coming soon? There's nothing about it in any blog posts, no FAQ about it, no thread on the forum that I found. It seems to be dedicated to explaining the New Analytics, which doesn't contain the basic function of checking student's viewing of the class. 

I did ask my admin staff to advocate. They are resigned to having to do my job for me. Do you know what that means? It means they have also given up on you ever doing anything about this. 

So despite how you yourself may feel, all evidence points to Canvas, as a company, not caring. 

...hey, guess what! Since I live in the Bay Area of California, both my partner and my best friend are software engineers. They're hard to get away from around here. I asked them both how hard it would be to add a tool to show how long users were on a particular page. 

Conversation 1:

"Let me look up Canvas...Looks like it shouldn't be too difficult if they actually track it...based on their analytics core...wait their instructions say anyone can access analytics?"

Me: "The data that the instructors get is limited and therefore inaccurate. You have to go to an admin to even get accurate data on page views."

"...Their system is based on an SQL so it should be pretty **bleep** easy. In my system it would take less than an hour or maybe two...I think the issue is that their security is not configured properly...the way they are doing it is based on your hierarchy level, based on what I'm reading. They don't have a lateral view."

Me: "I think what you're saying is that only people higher level than me can see what I need. That's accurate. That's the basis for this whole mess."

"...that in and of itself is poor design. Simple stuff like access should be default delivery."

Conversation 2:

"Not hard at all. If you are able to insert HTML and Javascript into Canvas you might be able to implement it yourself."

Me: "I don't know if I can insert those things, but I can let you take a look. Canvas keeps telling me that they're developing other things and that these things take time"

"Ha ha yeah that's not true. Assuming you have an analytics system in place already (and for some really crazy reason it's not already implemented) it would take one engineer a week at most."

By the way, both of them are baffled that this isn't already a thing.