Canvas Learner Profiles
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Lessons Learned from Canvas
Canvas de-emphasises centralised profiles in favour of displaying learner information within contextualised tools. How valuable are learner profile pages actually for most installations? And how can we use learner profile data to help contextualise what instructors and other learners see about the learners in their courses without having to navigate to a tangential page?
As is typically the case with Canvas, their tools are aimed primarily at K-12 classroom education. This means that they have no need of things like public profiles, or “bragging” pages for qualifications, because their learners are largely minors who should not be sharing their learner profiles externally. This helps to inform any tooling to support that use case, but means their learner profile functionality is relatively bare-bones.
Learner Profile Data
Every Canvas user has Account Settings, but Canvas also includes learner profiles as an optional feature. They are extremely bare-bones, as they expect most things such as demographic data to be collected externally to Canvas, for example in school systems.
Account Settings captures the following information:
Full Name
Used for grading
Display Name
Used in discussions, messages, and comments
Sortable Name
Intended as Last name, First name, and is intended to help with admin sorting
It seems like this may be a clunky workaround to capturing Full Name instead of First Name and Last Name.
Pronouns
Appear after the name when displayed in the UI
Default email
Allows a user to pick from a list of emails associated with the account
Language
Time Zone
Password
Learner profiles allow learners to set the following data:
Name
This is linked to the Display Name field from Account Settings, changing one will change the other
Pronouns
This is also linked to the Pronouns setting in Account Settings
Title
This is a completely free-form text field and can contain anything
Contact
This handles links to other services integrated with Canvas, such as Skype. You have to integrate the account in Account Settings to be able to list it on your profile.
Biography
Links
Has two fields for each link - display text and link. Appears to be intended for simply arbitrarily linking to external websites.
Learner Profile Page(s)
The profile page itself is very simple, and only displays data from the Learner Profile settings:
Within courses, however, staff can get more data from learner profiles, with the addition of the following section:
It is possible to access learner profile data from a few other locations too, such as within the instructor reporting dashboards. This means that while learner data is relatively sparse on the platform, it is decentralised - most of the time users will not be using the user profile page, but whatever tool displays that data in their current context, whether that’s within forums, analytics dashboards, grading, or other tools.