Student Activity Report: Student Time Log

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There are many reasons and uses for a Student Activity Report/Analytics that demonstrates the amount of time a student spent in an activity.  This Time Spent data should be available for both Instructors and Students to access and produce a report from.  Here are a couple use cases.

 

When looking at student success (or lack of success), it is great to see participation, but the page views is of dubious value. If a student simply clicks through pages, they get counted the same as someone who actually spent time reading the content of a page. I know we can see the time spent if we look at the login report (which I think needs to be more robust rather than only giving us the start time for the last time a page was viewed), but I would like to see something such as total time spent in course or total time each day etc. on the course analytics page along with participation and page views.

from INGRID PURRENHAGE

 

We have a state funded program that requires students to present a log of the time they spend in the online environment.  If they do not complete so many hours a week they lose their funding.  We have looked at the page view log available under the student account, but it does not give a solid login and logout point and the students cannot access it.

It would be helpful if students could produce their own activity report and if the report indicated how much time was spent in the course environment per day.

Copied from Previous Community

Original Poster:  Renee Carney

Many thanks to the following contributors: Betsy Walker, Kona Jones, Beth Young, Hilary Scharton

36 Comments
Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team
  Idea is currently in Product Radar Learn more about this stage...
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

For anyone interested in this topic, be sure to RSVP to the CanvasLIVE event Obtaining Access Report Data for an Entire Class , which is coming up this Friday, February 3, 2017. RSVP “yes” if you will be there--and if you’re interested, but your schedule doesn’t allow you to attend in real time, RSVP "no" or "maybe" to receive all event updates. Your RSVP ensures that you will receive a notification should the event be cancelled or changed.

estradak
Community Explorer

One of the best reports I have seen comes from OdysseyWare.  Their student activity reports have detailed information as to how long a student has been in each course.  Activity logs are important to show to parents as evidence to support a student's success or lack of success.

sarac_kondas
Community Novice

I would also like to see a more detailed report of student activity.  I would also like to see an option to lock down the browser when students are taking a quiz.  I feel like this could easily be a drop down option when instructors are drafting a quiz.  

emgreen
Community Novice

I desperately need this feature for the community college courses I am teaching.  I am required (by the state) to track total hours student is engaged with a course.  I think the fix is simple - the login log would work for me if Canvas would just have an automatic logout when students a) close a browser window or b) have no activity for 15 minutes.  This would obviate the problem of students leaving the window open but leaving the room, because they would just get automatically logged out.  While I see the pedagogical trickiness of assessing the value of the time the student is in the course, that really isn't my problem right now.  My problem is I am required to submit these hours and I have no way of counting them right now, short of hand-sorting the activity log to estimate when students enter and leave the course.  Which is an insane amount of work to do for each student.  So please, please fix this if you can!  My bank can do the automatic kick out, why not Canvas?

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni

 @emgreen ‌, if an automatic logout would solve this issue for you, you might want to reach out to your school's Canvas admin, because Canvas already offers this feature; it can be enabled at the account level by your school's CSM (Customer Success Manager) at the request of your school's Canvas admin. And, if the school requires students to authenticate through a third-party integration, the school's Canvas admin can set this timeout feature in the SIS itself (as described in How do I configure SSO settings for my authentication provider? ). 

emgreen
Community Novice

Thank you!

Any guidance is greatly appreciated, I've been struggling with this all

semester. I'm also new to canvas so I'm not always aware of all the

options.

Thanks,

Emilyn

On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 4:22 AM, Stefanie Sanders <instructure@jiveon.com>

alison_allen
Community Novice

I agree that it would be beneficial to see how long a student is working.  It would also be beneficial is there was a way to determine active and non active minutes, which would give teachers a broader perspective of how much effort individual students are giving.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

The Radar idea stage has been removed from the Feature Idea Process.  You can read more about why in the blog post Adaptation: Feature Idea Process Changes.

 

This change will only impact the stage sort of this idea and will not change how it is voted on or how it is considered during prioritization activities.  This change will streamline the list of ideas 'open for voting', making it easier for you to see the true top voted ideas in one sort, here.

glenaz
Community Novice

While a lot of the comments are referring to how the logging of student interaction for analytics and more/different data needs to be captured, I'm simply looking for a way to share with the student what data Canvas currently captures.  Right now, the data is hidden from them (which is not very useful), so at the very least, having them be able to see how much time they've spent in the course, which modules, pages, etc. they've viewed, and their final grade would help to incentivize some student to engage more.

Ideally, I'd like a quick "send student progress update" button on their Student Grades or Interactions Report with a place to put comments.  That way, as an instructor, I can at "mid-terms" let everyone know where they stand in terms of grades and give feedback on where they should be spending more time (i.e., more time on modules to understand the content, give more time for discussions or quizzes instead of waiting until the last minute, etc,).  I would think this would be an easy feature to implement since all of the data is already available to the instructor, but just not a simple way to collect and report on it for the student.

Here is my original post of ideas and comments: 

https://community.canvaslms.com/message/142345-re-can-students-see-their-activity-time-on-canvas-or-...

dianepbh
Community Participant

Current time data is extremely unhelpful and inaccurate. We have watched kids be in a course during a three hours course block of time, watched them work quickly through their courses and because they are quick, the time tracker does not capture their work. Raw time is better than no time. 

JoeBattistelli
Community Explorer

Yes! We really need a time log that shows a time and date stamp for every time a student accessed an assignment, quiz, new quiz, page, or any item in Canvas. At the end of the semester we frequently have students telling us how the assignment was never available to them in Canvas. The easiest way to end the argument is to bring up the access log and see that they accessed the assignment. The reports Canvas currently runs only show the first and last time the student accessed something, and only go back two weeks. We need the entire semester and we need time and date for every instance. I know the weekly access report shows us how many times during a week they accessed something, but that isn't helpful in refuting claims that the assignment wasn't available on a particular day.

BrittanyLauton
Community Novice

Commenting to say that the ability to export the information captured on the "People" page of a course would be extremely valuable. I run a campus-wide, optional orientation course that at its peak has >5000 students enrolled. Being able to export this data (re: time spent and last activity) would allow us to filter  and sort data to strategically communicate to student with low or no engagement. It would also allow us to make some informal estimation (even though it wouldn't stand up as formal data) of how students interact with the course from a time-spent perspective. Without an export feature, the info collected here is useless to me because of the high number of students enrolled in a course.

davisjoh
Community Explorer

I provide a suggested time to complete projects, work each week, and time to do the total course. There is no way a student can track how much time they are spending in the course. An instructor can see time in the course to date on the people page but a student only needs to see their info and not other students.

A place where students can see their activity history and time to date in course would allow for accountability and historical perspective on time for each student. 

Thanks

John Davis

East Carolina University

College of Business

cell 252-339-1077

DeborahAMorris
Community Novice

It's a little disappointing that this issue has been active since 2015 with no resolution. I can only add to the requests to include dates and times for student activity. The number of times pages are accessed is relatively meaningless unless when and for how long they are accessed is also available.

KristinL
Community Team
Community Team
Status changed to: Archived

Thank you for sharing this idea with the Instructure Community!

The Product Team reviewed all feature proposals recently, and unfortunately, this thread was identified as one that they would not be able to include in their current or future plans. While we appreciate your proposal, we also want to be transparent about the likelihood of something like this making it to production.

Thank you for collaborating, and we hope that you submit another idea in the future!