If you’re teaching with Canvas, you have access to a number of built-in analytics and statistics tools that can help provide a fuller picture of student engagement and performance: Canvas Course Analytics, Student Analytics, and Quiz Statistics. Canvas analytics and statistics are available to all UBC instructors and TAs through Canvas.
Course Analytics
Canvas Courses Analytics displays data about how students are interacting with various aspects of your Canvas course, providing visualizations for course activity, assignment submissions, and grades.
- Activity by Date shows page views and course participation, such as taking a quiz or posting a comment in a course.
- Submissions displays whether students have submitted an assignment on-time, late, or not at all.
- Grades shows the distribution of grades in a course.
Detailed instructions for accessing Course Analytics are available on the Canvas Guides. Canvas has also created a Course Analytics video tutorial.
Student Analytics
Canvas Student Analytics provides visualizations for several aspects of student activity and performance, including course participation, assignment submissions, communication, and grades.
There are a few scenarios where Student Analytics can be useful. For example, if you’re concerned that your students may be overwhelmed midway through the semester, the Assignment Submissions Graph can quickly show you the status of each assignment and the percentage of late, on time, and missing submissions.
Learn more about using Canvas Student Analytics.
Quiz Statistics
Canvas Quiz statistics provides data and visualizations that can be used to reflect on and refine future quizzes and quiz questions, including the highest and lowest quiz scores, the average amount of time spent in a quiz, and the distribution of student responses.
One particularly useful Quiz Statistics feature is the Discrimination Index, which can help identify potential issues with quiz questions by displaying the correlation between how well students scored on a particular quiz question and their overall score on the whole quiz. A higher score indicates that students who scored well on this question did well on the test overall, and a low score indicates that students who scored well on the whole quiz got this question wrong. Reviewing questions with low scores can help you quickly identify quiz question that may need to be reframed or reworded for clarity.
Learn more about using Canvas Quiz Statistics.
Learning analytics workshops
Facilitated by the Learning Analytics Project Team, UBC’s learning analytics workshops include an overview of new and emerging analytics tools, show you how to access and use specific learning analytics tools in your courses, and provide opportunities for discussions about interpreting data and for suggesting new features that could make analytics tools more useful for instructors and students.
Check out an upcoming learning analytics workshops or learn more about some of the learning analytics tools you can use in your courses.