User Course Access Log Report

[oxana]

Understanding online user behaviour has been paramount to the majority of our customers. During COVID-19, user click data is sought after even more. Canvas LMS has multiple tools for our customers to extract click data, such as Canvas Data request logs, live events, and our page view APIs. We also have course analytics tools with insights into student course participation. All data products provide a way of deducing common user online behaviour patterns but they require some data infrastructure investment, introduce unwanted data latency, or lack department level data aggregation. 

Our recently released User Course Access Log provides a simple csv data extract with a handful of useful data points such as user, section, term, content viewed, times viewed and last viewed timestamp. One could request data for up to a month timeframe from a present moment. As a data product manager, I looked for an opportunity to lessen the burden on our average customer when it comes to accessing, transforming and interpreting data. This report gives everyone an opportunity to analyze user LMS access patterns without expensive data processing infrastructure.

Typical use cases for this report are around student online access trends and analysis of most used content. There are also a handful of customers that could find this data useful to track user online presents and reflect it in their attendance dashboards. 

My team continues to work on reporting improvements. Presently we are working on introducing a new Quick Reports feature to our course Analytics tool. The reports we are creating will provide our teachers with a quick access to data they could see already in Canvas on multiple pages but not yet available as a simple csv extracts. Some examples are Missing, Late, and Excused Assignments for students in a section or an individual student; Course Roster; Students To Do List; and Students Course Content Access Log. This feature will be posted in the release notes when available.