Canvas - Platform-level Analytics and Reporting

Canvas admins can download CSV dumps of a wide range of data.

Open

While full details of exactly what these contain doesn’t appear to be readily available, what is interesting is that these reports can be constrained by term dates, and can include deleted objects, such as users, courses, and enrollments. Additionally, it appears that courses with hidden assignments do not display grades correctly in these reports, though again there is no indication of what will display incorrectly.

In addition to these reports, and much more interestingly, Canvas has two forms of analytics dashboard available at the account level - Account Analytics and Admin Analytics. Admin Analytics are in active development, so it’s not currently the default experience, and it’s worth separating the two.

Canvas Account Analytics

Open

Account analytics lets admins see analytics related to their account. Due to the way Canvas accounts work, this can be institution-wide, or at a lower level. For example, the university as a whole is an account, and the business school at that university can also be used as an account (more commonly referred to as a sub-account). This means that all of the analytics on this dashboard are available at each level defined by the account, and they report as granularly as the institution has their organisation configured to be.

Their documentation explains the dashboard itself pretty clearly, so I’ll just steal their explanation:

In account analytics, there are four main sections:

• Overview of what is in the account including Courses, Teachers, Students, Assignments, Discussion Topics, Files Uploaded, and Media Recordings.

• Activity by date allows the Admin to view how everyone is participating in the courses within the term and account.

• Activity by category allows the Admin to view the participation for Pages, Assignments, Modules, Discussions, Grades, Files, Collaborations, Announcements, Groups, Conferences, General, and Other.

• Grade distribution allows the Admin to view what the final grades and in progress grades look like during the term within the account.

Use account analytics to:

• Make sure the students, teachers, observers, and/or designers are participating in the course.

• See an overview of the term within the account.

• View how the users are interacting with the courses in the term.

• Watch how the grade distribution fluctuates or stays steady.

• View the total number of courses, teachers, students, assignments, submissions, discussion topics and replies, files, and media recording in the term within the account.

Canvas Admin Analytics

The newer version of account-level analytics is called Admin Analytics, which is apparently under current development and Instructure are actively requesting feedback from their users, so this isn’t its final version, and there’s a lot to be learned from their feedback (which I’ll capture when I look at the ideal analytics version). Admin analytics is split into 3 categories:

• Overview - This contains a set of pre-selected summary data that Instructure have apparently deemed as most important

• Courses - This contains data specifically about courses

• Students - This contains data about learners across all courses

Of note, the documentation mentions that Admin Analytics data is 24-48 hours old, suggesting that it is aggregated overnight, and not all data is aggregated on the same schedule (as otherwise it’d all be 24 or 48 hours old).

Each dashboard by default shows a standard time range - the current active term. But it can be filtered by a large range of properties:

• By sub-account

• By term

• By specific courses

• By instructor

• By course status (published, concluded, unpublished, deleted, with the first two being separated between courses that have activity in them)

• By courses with start dates within a range

• By course activity thresholds - This effectively allows the admin to define what their institution regards as an “active” course on the fly, for example saying that a course is active if it has more than 10 learner enrollments, or more than 500 learner engagement events on tracked pages.

• By learner activity thresholds - Similar to courses, but for each learner, defining them as active based on when they last accessed the course, when they last participated with an activity or viewed a page, or some combination of all three.

Admins can download reports limited to 5000 rows of all data behind the charts as CSV files. Overall, the admin analytics dashboards are, as you might expect, much more useful than the classic account analytics.

The documentation on admin analytics is deeply nested, with about 4 docs leading to one another, but you can find a full list of all the metrics and their definitions over in this article, which is a very useful resource. I’m going to list these data points and show the screenshots of these dashboards now, but it’s a lot of scrolling for detail, so if that article is enough, you may want to skip to Skilljar.

Overview

The overview dashboard displays visualisations of the following data:

• Courses by status

• Enrolled students with or without activity

• Teacher use of courses with activity

• Course status over time

• Enrolled students over time

• Average course grades

• Interactions by Canvas feature

  • Numbers of learners viewing pages and interacting with trackable elements on pages:

• Overall course interactions over time:

Courses

The courses dashboard shows visualisations of the following data:

• Published or concluded courses with activity

• Courses with an average grade less than 70%

• Courses in which 60% of students have no activity in last 7 days

  • These three are simply presented as raw numbers.

• Feature use in courses with activity

• Content feature use in courses with activity over time

• Activities feature use in courses with activity over time

• Individual courses with an average grade less than 70%

  • This and the next are presented as tables showing further details

• Courses with low student activity

Students

The students dashboard contains visualisations of the following data:

• Students with a current course score less than 60%

• Average grade for enrolled students

• Students with no course activity in last 30 days

• Average days since the last course interaction

  • These are presented as simple numbers

• Grade averages for enrolled students

• Student submissions by status

• Student details

Student details are also interesting, to extract the column headings from their screenshots:

• Name

• Courses enrolled

• Courses with grade

• Submissions on time compared to all

• Average score

• Courses with below average grade

• Raw score difference

• Standardised score difference

• Days since last active