The use of a Learning Management System (LMS) has the potential to influence student engagement in a course (https://beerc.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/onlinestudentengagement.pdf). We might expect that students who access LMS content more frequently are more engaged in course activities. And, although we cannot make the assumption that students will do better if they are more engaged in LMS course activities, it is still beneficial for instructors to understand how students are spending their time in Canvas.

Canvas provides course instructors with an Access Report for each student that shows how many times a student has viewed or participated in a particular item. However, it is unlikely that course instructors will compile the report for each student to better understand overall student content engagements in a course. In this module, we will talk about how to obtain, analyze and leverage Canvas access reports to inform overall student content engagements.

Learning Objectives

Upon completing this module, course participants should be able to:

install an userscript that gathers the access report data for an entire course
understand the common fields included in the the Access Report raw data
load the data to an app that analyzes the access report data
understand content usage in a course, and apply the results to improve course design that better facilitates student engagements