Canvas Data Access Offering: Share Your Thoughts about Datasets

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Data is a powerful tool that has the potential to transform the way we offer education to students. Over the past five years, the Canvas data sharing product has been very important to our users and institutions.

In its current offering, Canvas Data is very limited in the type of datasets we share and sharing capabilities. Our customers have been asking to improve the existing product as they consider Canvas Data to be an essential feature of their Canvas learning management system.

We are working on an improved version of our data sharing feature. This updated edition will provide access to various Instructure educational product data, allow more scalable ways of downloading large datasets, and most importantly, deliver data changes just in time to make time sensitive decisions. 

We have already reviewed and planned to implement basic datasets around scores, submissions, enrollments, courses, users, and a handful of learning activities such as assignments, discussions, and quizzes. At this time, we need your help to prioritize what you would like to see in the next version of the datasets schema. If you are interested in sharing your feedback, please fill out our Data Access Feedback Form. This form will only take a few minutes of your time. Email addresses are required, so please log in using an account where we may contact you if we have additional followup questions.

Please share your thoughts so we can make product choices that include your voice.

Responses will be accepted through Monday, February 17. [CLOSED FOR VOTE]

Thank you!

 

UPDATE 2/21/2020

We conducted a successful survey to collect all of your thoughts around data you prefer to see in our  Data Access Offering. Thank you so much for participating and sharing your thoughts! 

These are the results of the survey; we will use them to guide us through planning our Data roadmap.

Addressing some of your feedback 

1. We still need access to all data that is currently available in the old Canvas Data but not listed in survey.

The new data offering will provide access to all datasets currently available in old Canvas Data. The survey conducted simply aimed to identify a subset of additional datasets that we may make available as part of this solution.  

2. Need the ability to have datasets scoped by access role/account so faculty could have access to it; need the ability to receive the report via email. 

To address this feedback, let me share the vision for this new product.

 The new Data Access Offering is a set of services and technologies that will provide you with access to your institution raw data across various Instructure educational products. It is a revamp and expansion of our “Canvas Data” offering, and the purpose  of this offering is to allow institution IT/data teams to retrieve their school’s LMS data in bulk so they can conduct their own research and build custom analytics dashboards and tools to meet the unique needs of the institution. The intended audience for this tool is institution data analysts, developers, or data administrators with some knowledge of raw data collection and transformation. Features that allow users to interact with analytics or generate reports from within the Canvas LMS UI are not part of this work.

The following list displays the datasets prioritized by your votes:

1. Modules
2. New Quizzes
3. Account: roles, account users
4. Rubrics
5. Outcomes
6. Originality Reports [ Plagiarism related data]
7. Conversations
8. Attachments
9. Master Courses
10. Wikis
11. Developer Keys
12. Mastery Paths
13. Calendar
14. Commons
15. Catalog

Other  datasets you requested in the survey comment that we haven’t considered yet:

1. Studio
2. Portfolium 
3. Faculty Journal 
4. Attendance [ Roll Call]
5. SCORM 
6. User Access Tokens metadata only  [ who created them]
7. LTI tools data access level

Note : if you don’t see your feedback addressed above, we’ve already placed it on the roadmap, or it is an idea that is more difficult to implement and we are considering options to breach the gaps. I am also planning on reaching out to some of you directly to get more details about your specific feedback. Please stay tuned for more updates!