Analytics for iOS Devices

Nearly 4 years ago our district made the switch from Moodle over to Canvas and we've been not only been thrilled with that decision, but we've gotten tremendous buy-in from teachers across our district who are using our new LMS on a daily basis. At about the same time that we made the decision to invest time, money and resources into a switch over to Canvas, our district (17,000 students and 1,400+ educators) embarked on a journey to implement a One2One environment with iPads (PK-12). As of this year we are fully immersed in our One2One initiative and students and teachers alike are using Canvas every day for teaching and learning. Our students live in a mobile device world in our district and having analytic reports that only show data from a Canvas web experience, not a Canvas APP experience, is not helpful to our teachers, students and our parents. People want (and need) to know how a student is progressing in their work via Canvas and at what rate their learning is taking place. Is improving the analytic reports so that they show and record taps and views of a Canvas experience through the mobile device APP on the roadmap for development? This would we SUPER helpful to a district our size that is living in a One2One learning environment using your LMS. 

Thank you,
Mark Pohlman

Director of Instructional Technology

Hilliard City Schools

16 Comments
KristinL
Community Team
Community Team

Hi pohlmanma‌ ~

Thank you for taking the time to submit this idea to Canvas Studio‌. As a teacher in a 1:1 school myself, I couldn't agree with you more. Right now, as stated at the top of How do I view Course Analytics?, "Analytics does not measure activity on mobile devices." The information that teachers are missing out on is really valuable.

With Canvas Data, there are ways to get information about mobile.  @rseilham ‌ did a great presentation called 

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. Canvas Admin can also see information about page views from a browser or mobile app. ( How do I view the page views for a user in an account?) ...but having mobile participation from any mobile Canvas app included right in the easy-to-read analytics would be amazing.

I'm sure other Canvas Mobile Users‌ would agree. I look forward to seeing how this discussion unfolds.

Bobby2
Community Champion

pohlmanmaI agree. Primary schools are using iPads a lot lately. Analytics would be affected by mobile use.  @rseilham 

video was helpful though. Thank you  @KristinL 

davidh1
Community Participant

I would love to see this gain traction, and not just for IOS, but for all mobile. I have a current problem with participation and submission discrepancies due to some students using mobile apps, which aren't tracked for participation or submissions, and others using their browser. As a result, the analytics are mostly useless. The Canvas admin on my campus is way too busy to parse details for individual instructors.

Bobby2
Community Champion

Really good points  @dhurst 

Thanks to Canvas for listening and hopefully changing for us.

kristin_bayless
Community Contributor

This is a feature we'd really like to see. I didn't realize how much it was needed until I linked Google Analytics to Canvas to try to get some basic use data. While  @rseilham 's video was great, if I'm understanding correctly, his institution uses the Canvas Redshift product to house their Canvas data. Even with that leg up on those of us without Redshift, they have to analyze the huge Requests file to get to user agent data and there can be numerous iOS agents.  Kudos to Ryan for figuring this out, but presenting this project to our team was met with jaws dropped.  If I could get at app use with Google Analytics, it would be awesome. Thanks to the Canvas Community instructions, I found that pretty easy to get going and I'm not a programmer.  It would be even better if Instructure included app use in the Canvas analytics.  We're also 1:1 iPads for K12.

Please vote this up!

KristinL
Community Team
Community Team

 @dhurst , I agree; the analytics would need to represent activity from all mobile devices. There is such value in knowing about all students' activity, regardless of the device they use.

rseilham
Community Champion

I'd love to have Google Analytics support in the app. Of course I don't know of the technical requirements for that, but without any knowledge, it would be awesome. 

Yes, Canvas Data is helpful, but the process does take quite a bit of time. I think it would be nice if there was an easy way to get the most popular data without digging into Canvas Data. if you want to dig further, then you have the option to dig deeper into the Canvas Data. 

christopher_phi
Community Champion

I shared some information on how to get some of that mobile data here: 

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-13159-google-tag-manager-recipes#jive_content_id_Mobile_or_...  

More information on this page: 

Google Analytics and Canvas Resources  

I agree that making this data more accessible would be very useful! 

rseilham
Community Champion

Hi  @christopher_phi , 

As for using tag manager to get Mobile app information vs browser, what kind of information are you gathering? Are you using there mobile JS with GTM? From my understanding, the mobile JS only works with Canvas Pages and not the entire app, but I could be wrong. 

Thanks again for sharing! 

christopher_phi
Community Champion

Hey  @rseilham ‌, the biggest thing we are using it for right now is to determine how many users are using the mobile app vs desktop usage or mobile browsers and how their behavior differs. I just took a look at what data it is tracking and saw data coming in from /pages, /quizzes and a couple of external tools so it is definitely missing data from a number of content types - thank you! 

We are using the standard JS, but should probably look at using the mobile JS. 

rseilham
Community Champion

Yeah, it's tricky. I think the only (somewhat) definitive way to identify mobile app usage is Canvas Data, but not every school can invest time and effort into that. 

RobDitto
Community Champion

communityteam‌, do the tags on this idea mean that it's treated as requesting analytics for mobile generally, as opposed to iOS only?  

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

Hey  @RobDitto ‌ - Yes, and this is pretty common whenever an iOS or android idea is submitted.  We want to look at them for overall mobile strategy!

RobDitto
Community Champion

Thanks, Renee, that's very helpful (and what I hoped for!).

tomasdore
Community Participant

Now the phrase mentioned in the original post,"Analytics does not measure activity on mobile devices", has gone from the page that is linked to ( How do I view Course Analytics?) so I wonder if things are different now? Also because we have 'New Analytics'. So what is the status now for tracking access by users on mobile devices (in the app, or indeed in a browser)? Can anyone point me to any guidance? 

ProductPanda
Instructure
Instructure
Status changed to: Archived
Comments from Instructure

As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.