Students will soon have access to the analytics function.
By Erasmus Baxter
Access an assignment at 1 a.m., or wait till the day before it’s due to start on it? Your professor may know, due to the analytics function on Canvas.
The function shows professors how many times a day a student has viewed or interacted with their class’s canvas page, as well as how many times they viewed specific content, such as an assignment page or document, and at what time they last viewed it.
For example, a professor could see that you downloaded the course syllabus 20 times, the last time being at 9 p.m. on Sunday.
Sophomore Anna Hoekman was unaware of the feature. She says that while it’s not a big deal to her personally, it seems like an invasion of privacy.
“[I] think of [Canvas] more as a private forum for me,” she said.
Currently students are not able to view this data on themselves but they will soon be able to, according to John Farquhar, Director of Western’s Academic Technology & User Services (ATUS).
“[Students viewing their analytics] is turned off by default by Instructure and therefore was accepted by our staff as our standard,” Farquhar said in an email.
Farquhar said that the staff would like to provide that function to students. They recently began working on a plan to make it an option.
“At present, we are waiting to hear back from Instructure if there are any other changes that occur by making this available,” he said. “Assuming that there are none, we will turn [student access] on as soon as possible.”
Political Science Professor Paul Chen says that he he’s hardly looked at the data Canvas stores.
“I certainly wouldn’t use Canvas’s data for measuring effort, or else students could just access Canvas material & stayed logged in, pretending to be using it when in fact they are doing something else,” he said in an email.
He says that he’s heard instructors discuss using Canvas data to show a correlation between time spent on assignments and a higher grade, but considers such a connection obvious.
He does not think students should be concerned about their Canvas usage being logged, but also acknowledges that knowing that they are being monitored may change student’s behavior.
“Whenever we think we’re being observed, we change our behavior,” Chen said. “On a deeper level, this merely shows the difference [between] appearance & reality. It’s important to always be reminded that appearance is not reality, despite our tendency to assume that it is.”
Hoekman says that knowing Canvas is collecting data for other people will change her use of it.
“[I’m going to] be more aware of what I’m doing,” she said.
Once students are able to view their own analytics, they can access them by going to “People” under the class menu, clicking on their name and choosing “Analytics.” The graphs will show your activity in the class by date, your communications with the professor, your submissions by timeliness, and your grades plotted on a box-and-whisker chart of the class scores.
