Possible bug with Group Discussions and Student/Course Analytics

[cassidy_vela]

Here's a weird one for you all. We recently created a little app that leverages the Canvas API to pull the participations information for each enrollment. Participations is seen through the student analytics page and includes things like submitting an assignment, participating in discussions, etc... This is being used to measure student engagement. It is working great for every course but one.

This course has split its students into three groups. Each module has several discussions per group formatted as questions ("Question 1: group 1", "Question 2: group 1", "Question 1: group 2", etc...). When I enter these discussions as an Admin, I am encountered with this message, "Since this is a group discussion, each group has its own conversation for this topic. Here are the ones you have access to:" then the group name. When I click on the group name, I enter the group view and am then able to see the discussion responses.

Now here's where things get weird, participating in discussions counts as a participation, but when I see the student analytics view, there are no participations (this is the same from the API). Every student in the course has the same problem. However, when I go to the student access report, the "Times Participated" column has plenty of participations listed in the aforementioned discussions.

To throw in one more oddity, course analytics only has 10/19 students showing on the bottom of the page (these are also missing participations), but participations do show up in the "Activity by Date" graph.

These definitely have something to do with using the Group Discussion feature. Somehow, setting the discussion as a group discussion prevents the participations data from populating into the student and course analytics pages.

Any ideas or similar experiences?

[cassidy_vela · Accepted solution]

Updates from Canvas Support:

"I would be happy to help. I did some digging into this, and it looks like you are talking about a couple known situations with Analytics. The first one is the group discussion not showing up in Analytics. The other one is how only 10/19 students are showing up on the analytics page. This one there is a work around, you can right click the page and hit inspect element and it finishes loading the students."

"Hello, We've deployed a fix for this issue in our Beta environment. If all goes well, it will make it to the live Production environment on July 31, 2019."

[EmileSorger]

Hello, I'm having this same issue and am wondering if any solutions have been uncovered or if you can recommend an alternative way of analyzing participation within group discussions.  Thank you so much.

[cassidy_vela]

I was told by Canvas Support that this issue was resolved with a bug fix on Oct 21, 2019. We had started a new semester and no longer had this problem, so I assumed it was fixed.