[Reports] Improve "Page Views" UI

[pchaney]

The user "Page Views" information is not very useful as it is presently designed. Two small tweaks with the UI could vastly improve it's present functionality until a more comprehensive admin tool can be developed. The first would be to set From-To date/times for page views occurring during a certain time period(perhaps with a default setting of a month) and second, provide the option to view All Data or a Specific Course's data. The downloadable CSV file would also match the query information requested by this UI tweak. The Page Views page could also be launched into a new tab.  

Below is an image of what these tweaks would look like in the UI.

This small tweak (until something better is developed) would allow Canvas admins to better investigate issues, rather than tell instructors and students the information is not available or outside of a default date range.

[Renee_Carney]

Hi  @pchaney ​

Will you take a look at

Do either of those cover what you are looking for?

[pchaney]

Hi Renee,

No, both of links are not the same thing. This should just be a small tweak on the Canvas development side to get some basic control of page view data being returned. Being able to narrow the data to a single course and/or a specific time range changes a data query, which shouldn’t be too hard to do, and could make the tool more useful while a more robust tool could be developed.

Thanks,

Paul

[biray]

Hi  @pchaney ​. While I agree that the two ideas that  @Renee_Carney ​ proposed may not have anything to do with the UI suggestion stated in your idea, I think she was trying to understand the underlying reason for your request. What is the type of data you are hoping to extract and would those two ideas achieve that (albeit in a different way than a UI change).

Also, have you heard of our newest upcoming feature Canvas Studio: Canvas Data (Hosted data service)​? We are demoing this service via a webinar later this month Diving for Data: A Preview of Canvas Data​. Canvas Data will allow users to pull a variety of additional data and statistics from Canvas.

Looking forward to your feedback.

[pchaney]

Hi Biray,

The Activity report allows for a quick look to see the last time a user clicked an item and how many times. It doesn't "track" real timeline-based activity, only how recent or busy. Tracking shows how a user is moving in the course sequentially. The Page View tool is  better in terms of tracking and is really the only option we have. Tracking user activity as admins, many times we are called upon to verify academic integrity.

For example, towards the end of a term, an instructor suspects two students have been working together during the term to cheat on exams. Here the Activity report is pretty useless, but Page Views could be helpful to track what the students are doing. Unfortunately, it's CSV report only goes back to a default number of days, usually not enough to establish any pattern.  You can keep scrolling as more page view data is displayed and cut/paste that data into a text file, but the data is all thrown together with other courses and the displayed fields may not show what you need to know.

Using this same scenario with our previous LMS, first we would compare grades and times exams were taken. If anything looked suspicious we would take a closer look at the tracking using a tracking report (page views within a course) . See screenshot below:

If there was enough evidence to continue, we could then start to build a case with more granular methods to obtain IP addresses matched to timelines and items clicked, etc. With these small UI tweaks, choosing date ranges and filtering by course, the Page View tool becomes a lot more useful to get a quick idea if something is suspicious requiring further investigation or not.

This scenario is just one example of how important tracking is to verify academic integrity. Having been able in our previous LMS to prove/disprove academic integrity and technical issues, instructors have been surprised to hear us say "we can't tell" with Canvas. Canvas Data may be promising for the future, but these UI tweaks would allow us to fulfill our responsibility now and would be useful even after Canvas Data is released.

Thanks,

Paul

[biray]

Ah, okay. Thank you sincerely for the clarification. This idea will be open for vote in the next voting cycle.

[Renee_Carney]

This idea is now open for voting.

[snugent]

I use the page views feature all the time and this would really help!

[millerjm]

Another field that is badly needed on this screen is to either have it made obvious that it was performed while masqerading or have the masquerading data excluded from this screen. 

Here is a related feature idea that isn't quite up for voting yet: 

[millerjm]

This related idea is up for vote now: 

User Activity and Analytics reports for Instructors: Exclude Masquerade activity

[cward]

Hi all,

Thanks for the good feedback in this thread! We're planning on rolling this functionality out into the UI as part of our Analytics 2.0 project, but in the meantime you can filter and slice the requests data (page views) any which way you need using Canvas Data​.

Thanks!

Chris