Investigating student page views using New Analytics or prerequisites

Investigating student page views

You may wish to investigate which students have accessed which pages, and to nudge those who have not been active. There are three ways of doing this, with varying degrees of complexity:

1. View page activity and email students manually
2. Set a module (containing pages) as a prerequisite to a module (containing a simple quiz)
3. Manipulate raw data downloaded to Excel

1. View page activity and email students manually

Using the New Analytics tool, you can get a list of students showing the number of page views. It’s sortable by Page views so you can sort from least to most:

Click on the download icon to download the list as a CSV file showing student names and email addresses. Then you would need to manually email those who do not display a 'sufficient' number of page views. 

2. Set a module (containing pages) as a prerequisite to a module (containing a simple quiz)

This method shows how to set up one module (containing required pages) as a prerequisite to another module containing a 'dummy' quiz. The quiz would contain one  simple question for students to acknowledge that they have read the foregoing content pages. The results of the quiz will be tracked in the Grades tool (see further details below), from which you can infer that students who have accessed and completed the quiz have viewed the foregoing required pages.

Step 1: Create the quiz containing one or more simple questions

See the Canvas guide: How do I create a quiz? Links to an external site.

Step 2: Create a module containing all the required pages (the 'content' module). Edit this module and mark all the pages as required

See the Canvas guide: How do I add requirements to a module? Links to an external site.

Note: You need to Add requirement for each item that is required, and select from the drop-down list: 'view the item'; or 'mark as done'; or 'contribute to the page'.

Step 3: Create a module containing only the quiz (the 'quiz' module). Edit this module and under prerequisites, select the content module.

See the Canvas guide: How do I add prerequisites to a module? Links to an external site.

Students will only be able to access the quiz after they have at least opened all the pages in the content module:

Teacher (or course administrator) view:

The students will see the requirements on the content module. They will see that the quiz exists (in the following module), but it will be locked until they have viewed all the required pages.

Student view:

In the Grades tool ('gradebook'), a column for the quiz will be created automatically. Go to the Grades tool to view who has completed the quiz:

You can sort the Quiz column by 'Missing' which allows you to quickly see who has not completed the quiz (and, by implication, not viewed the required pages in the prerequisite module):

In the Grades tool, when you click a student's name, it also gives a quick star rating of their participation and page views on the course compared with their peers:

3. Manipulate raw data downloaded to Excel

Use the New Analytics tool and access the Reports tab. Then run the Course activity report:

This will produce a CSV file which you can download. It will show extensive details of who viewed which pages, how many times and when. You may need to do further manipulation of this data in Excel to produce the summaries that you need.