What is the meaning of, or how are students generating "user-generated" links in Canvas LMS

[saustin]

Good morning, I was attempting to trouble-shoot problems that a student was having with her exam.  To do so, I looked in her URL history and saw that some of the links were "user-generated" as seen in the screen shot below.

How are these created within the LMS?  In this instance, the user-generated links started at about 10:30am and ended about 10:31 am; downloading the .csv file associated with this user and cross-checking against the Canvas Page Views UI, it appears there were 270 instances of this in one minute.   The IP address associated with the "User-Generated" notation belongs to Google Cloud.

I am including screenshots:  the first, shows the beginning of the "User-Generated" URLs at 10:30am, the second, the last of the "User-Generated" URLs at 10:31am.

Additional information is that this user was taking a test with Proctorio.  Thank you so much for any information available.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @saustin,

That is the user-agent column you're looking at there according to the How do I view the page views for a user in an acco... - Instructure Community - 93  guide..  I believe the "user-generated" entries there refer to a user-generated API token being responsible for the access tow you're looking at.  I don't know enough about Proctorio to know if it would use a user-generated token, though my guess is probably not (installed apps using developer keys should generally be identified as something other than user-generated).  There are a ton of possibilities of what could be going on here...  Could be a screenreader, could be an app like Speechify (which annoyingly directs users to create user-generated tokens), could be something else completely... It's going to be hard to get a definite answer to this, as even though there is a "description" type field for the token, it's just user input, so anyone could type anything they wanted there.  If you have a concern, it's probably something you'd have to have a conversation with the student, though it's going to have to be a delicate conversation in my opinion.

I hope this helps a bit.

-Chris

[saustin]

This is fantastic feedback, @chriscas and one that makes a lot of sense.

I've been looking at a lot of the URLs in the user-agent column lately, to try to understand the environment a user was working in when they took a test.   I've not seen that particular value associated with Proctorio before, but in this particular case, the student was unable to get Proctorio to work on her own computer, and had to use (as I understand it) a school computer to take the test.   An API token for her to use Proctorio on the strange computer would make a lot of sense, I think.  I'm also very appreciative of your observation that this could have been a screen-reader; if we get students who require accommodations for any reason, I'll be able to track this a little better to see if they are able to succeed getting on the test, or whether the environment is preventing them from doing so.    

Again, I am very appreciative of this feedback -- it makes great sense, and gives me something to look out for, in the future.

Thank you so much, and have a great day!

Sharon