[ARCHIVED] Analytics API - Data Query

[courtney_osulli]

Hi, 

I am playing with the Analytics endpoints atm to build a student participation report and i am a bit flummoxed trying to work out what the difference between some of the values were as some were not what i was expecting based on what i see in the UI and i though who better to ask than the community.  

Take the below extract from a Student summary in a Course.

 {
        "id": 3718,
        "page_views": 142,
        "max_page_views": 249,
        "page_views_level": 2,
        "participations": 4,
        "max_participations": 8,
        "participations_level": 3,
        "tardiness_breakdown": {
            "missing": 3,
            "late": 1,
            "on_time": 0,
            "floating": 5,
            "total": 9
        }
    }‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

I was wondering what the difference was between max_page_view and page_views?

And what the Page Views Level was ? It looks like it might be a ratio as 142/249 is around 0.57. So 2 would be 50%?

Would this be this students view's versus the rest of the course? What is the level based on?

Same with Participants. What is the difference between Participations and Max Particpations? 

Tardiness makes sense so far but curious what floating are? Assuming they are assignments that aren't due yet? 

Thanks in advance for any assistance,

Cheers 

Courtney O'Sullivan

[robotcars]

cc: @InstContentTeam ‌, these endpoints don't have the common What an # object looks like, just an example of the response. Can this be documented? Analytics - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation

[bmerkel · Accepted solution]

And what the Page Views Level was ? It looks like it might be a ratio as 142/249 is around 0.57. So 2 would be 50%?

Would this be this students view's versus the rest of the course? What is the level based on?

Same with Participants. What is the difference between Participations and Max Particpations? 

Tardiness makes sense so far but curious what floating are? Assuming they are assignments that aren't due yet? 

Floating assignments, you're correct, they are assignments that have due dates in the future.. or (I think) don't have a due date.

For Participations vs Max Participations  and  Page Views vs Max Page Views, the Participations/Page Views are those for that particular user and the Max is the most anyone has in that class.

They include that so you can do some simple ranking on an individual without having to pull and calculate the entire course roster.

[courtney_osulli]

Thanks Brian, I eventually got there. Thanks for the reply. 

The bit that threw me was the scale for Max Participations and Views was from 0-3.  
Managed to get a good student participation report out of this so thanks. 

[bmerkel]

Oh the level? Ya, I never found a good use for the levels.

Have you spot checked the results on your report lately? The reason this post caught my eye was because I came looking for some reasons as to why my report numbers are off from actual. For instance, I have a list of students for a particular course and not only can I see that their participation/page view counts are way off, the total number of assignments is wrong too.

Anyway, heads up.

[James]

page_views and participations are for that student, max_page_views and max_participations are for anyone in the course. This is from the graphQL documentation.

Other people have said that levels represent (1) the upper third, (2) the middle third, and (3) the lower third.

That doesn't explain the 0 and it doesn't match up with the analytics source code, which describes quartiles. That would suggest 0 (0-25%), 1 (25-50%), 2 (50-75%), and 3 (75-100%).

However, that doesn't match with the values that are actually returned by Canvas.

I went in and used the graphiql interface to give me all of the analytics for my course. You'll need to replace 1234 by your course ID (both places). I included the name only so I could double check the values were making sense.

query summaryAnalytics {
  course(id: "1234") {
    usersConnection {
      nodes {
        name
        summaryAnalytics(courseId: "1234") {
          pageViews {
            level
            max
            total
          }
          participations {
            level
            max
            total
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}
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It returned one null value (me, the teacher) that I threw out and everyone else (including the test student) was either level 1, 2, or 3. There was no level 0. That says it's not quartiles.

When I sort by levels, level 3 has the highest totals while level 1 has the lowest totals. This is the opposite of what I had read elsewhere in the Community.

The three levels are not split equally, either.

The numbers may be off a little (my sample size was only 40), but it looks like these approximate percentages.

1: bottom 15%

2: middle 60%

3: top 25%

I then went in and reset the test student so that the number of page views and participations was both 0. The level for the test student is now 0.

I say the numbers are approximate. I originally thought it was about 28% or 29% for the top, but then I did another class with 64 students and it started level 2 at 73% I'm calling it top 25%, but it is somewhere in the 25-30% range. Obviously that would change the middle group if you change the upper group.

Here's my final analysis of level based off of empirical data.

0: none

1: bottom 15%

2: middle 60%

3: top 25%