[ARCHIVED] What does 'Total Activity' actually mean?

[h_dalton]

What does the analytic about 'Total Activity' (hr:min:sec) for each student actually mean?

[kblack · Accepted solution]

Hi h.dalton Welcome to the worldwide Canvas Community. I see you've been a member since early 2016, but this appears to be your first post in the Community...so welcome!  The topic of just how much time a student has spent in a course site in Canvas has been discussed quite a bit in the Community, and others may remember some specific conversations here.  But to address your question directly, the official explanation is from this page in the Instructor's Guide:  How do I use the People page as an instructor?  specifically, the following statement:

• Total Activity [7]—allows you to see how long students interact within a course and counts page navigation only. Total activity time is displayed in hours:minutes:seconds. If a user has not yet reached an hour of activity, total activity time is displayed as minutes:seconds. Total Activity records any time spent viewing course content that exceeds two minutes. If the time between a new activity and the last completed activity is under ten minutes, all time between these two events will also be included. Total Activity does not include group activity or page views for videos that do not include intermediate page requests, such as a half-hour recorded lecture. To view specific page views for a student, view the student's course access report.

One of the leading Community members, resident genius  @James ‌, has produced a program that breaks down the information for a class all at once that is available here, if you are interested:  Obtaining and using Access Report data for an entire course .  Hope this helps a bit.

[qnguyen]

Hi,

Is there a way for me to download this report ? I can't find a way to download the Total Activity for each student in a class of 3000 members.

Thanks

[James]

 @qnguyen  

The total activity is available from the List users in course endpoint of the Courses API when you include[]=enrollments. This also includes the last_activity_at and the course score and grade, provided you have permissions to read this.

Some issues with large classes forced me to rework my Access Report script and I switched API calls to get the class list. I am adding those four values to script. I hope to get the update out today or tomorrow.

That code will include everything needed to get a roster with the activity data, so I plan on stripping out the access report and releasing a roster script as well.

[j_lowther]

Ideally I'd like to download a list of students and their total activity on each module in a digital hours format (so 1.5 hours rather than 01:30:00).  I found the hh:mm:ss format difficult to calculate with esp if you have students with mm:ss in the same set - e.g. adding 01:30:00 to 15:00 gives 16:30:00 rather than 01:45:00?