Admin Analytics: Coming to a Canvas environment near you

[carlycurran]

You asked. We answered! I’m thrilled to let you know that Admin Analytics will be available as a Feature Option with the March 29th Canvas deploy.

What

Admin Analytics is a new, in-app analytics space. It comes with Canvas LMS, as part of your Canvas LMS license. 

Three new analytics dashboards

Three dashboards show you data related to Canvas usage at your institution (think breadth of Canvas usage), Canvas course success (think depth of Canvas usage), and student engagement. 

Admin Analytics will help you answer questions like: 

• Which courses are published or unpublished this term?
• Which courses are published but did not have activity this academic year?
• Are there students enrolled in courses this term who have not had any activity in their courses? Which students?
• Which Canvas features are widely used and which are not? 
• For those migrating to New Quizzes: Which courses are using New Quizzes? Can I find a power user? 
• Are there courses where student averages are low? What about student engagement?
• How are students doing across their Canvas courses?

Overview dashboard

Course dashboard

Student dashboard

More options to filter or aggregate your data

As an admin, you can filter your data by:

• Subaccount or sub-subaccount or sub-sub-subaccount or… you get the picture. You can filter at any level of your account hierarchy, and you can multi-select as many accounts as you’d like!
• Term. Again, you can multi-select as many terms as you’d like, so if you want to get the full picture of your academic year, you can do that. 
• Course. If you want to look at a specific course, or a few related courses, you can filter to that level of granularity. You can search for courses by name and select many at one time. 
• Teacher. Search for specific teachers and see courses in which that teacher is enrolled across terms or subaccounts. 

You can also refine your data search by: 

• Filtering on course status. For example, you can search for courses that are published with activity. 
• Viewing “over time” data by week or month.
• Setting criteria for how a “course with activity” is defined and how a “student with activity” is defined. 

Watch our video overview here!

Who

Admin Analytics is available to Canvas users with the root and subaccount admin roles. Root account admins will be able to see data for the entire institution. Subaccount admins will see data for their subaccount, if they have both of the following permissions:

• Grades - view all grades
• Analytics - view pages

Why

Why did we build Admin Analytics? You’ve been asking for more data to better understand and drive Canvas LMS usage at your institution. We absolutely want you to be able to do that! 

In the same way our Instructure product teams strive to make data-driven decisions, we know you want to do that for your institutions as well. This is one of a few steps we’re taking to get that data in your hands. (hello, Canvas Data 2!) 

When  

Admin Analytics will be available as a Feature Option in the Canvas deploy on March 29th. This Feature Option will be OFF by default. 

Where

Canvas LMS production instance

Enable Admin Analytics on March 29th, after the Canvas deploy, by going to Settings > Feature Options > Admin Analytics 

Admin Analytics Feature Option

Canvas LMS Beta instance

Admin Analytics will be available in your Canvas Beta instance after it is available in production. When beta is cut from production on Saturday, April 1st, you will be able to turn on Admin Analytics in your beta instance. 

Who (part 2) 

I want to give credit to our amazing engineering team and product designer, who have worked so hard for the past year to deliver this set of features. I feel incredibly fortunate to work with these folks on a daily basis. They’re smart, solution-oriented, hard-working, able to solve tough problems, and just plain fun to spend time with.

Big round of applause for Kevin Rood, Bryant Larsen, Kwok Lam, Alexandre DosSantos, Noah Rush, Thiago Vieira, and Danielle Fortier. 

Admin Analytics engineering team

On the horizon

I want to give you a preview of what our high-level timeline looks like for the rest of the year. 

Q2

• Filter enhancements. During our closed beta, we heard from customers that you want to be able to easily see the filters you’ve selected, and that you want filter search and selection to be simpler. We’re working on it! 
• A11Y improvements. We’re committed to making the filters, charts, and drill down data more accessible. 
• Internationalization. We’ll add all Canvas LMS language packs. 
• Performance tuning. We’re continually working to improve dashboard load times. 

2H 2023

• Data latency decreases. Admin Analytics is currently using the same data sources as Canvas Data 1, so data will be 24-48 hours old. In the second half of 2023, we’re going to work on using Canvas Data 2 to reduce that latency. 

Read the full Admin Analytics FAQ here.  

[KathyPalm]

Exciting update! Thanks for all the hard work and congrats on release.

[Nhadley12]

Thanks so much! This is great, but when is it in Prod? Is there a specific time it becomes available? It's not in our admin panel as a feature preview to turn on. 

[audra_agnelly]

I posted in the deploy notes but no one responded. Average course grade, Courses With Average Scores Below 70, Student Overall Average are pulling an average of all assignments since the start of the year. K12 clients use grading periods and we need average grade data that reflects the current grading period, an all-year average as a data point is not meaningful to my admins. It's also misleading as users won't understand that the averages they are seeing are not the current quarter. I have brought this up in the New Analytics user group as well, the course average there is also a running average since the start of the year rather than the current marking period. A filter to toggle grading periods like you can in the gradebook is needed.

[audra_agnelly]

One question I sometimes get asked by my school admins is how they can monitor teacher activity at their school, primarily around usage of the gradebook. The course screen seems focused on student activity (which can certainly reflect what the teacher is doing), but I'm not seeing that it shows if a teacher has gone into their course on a regular basis to post assignments and grades. This is a question I received recently from one of our principals: "is there a way for Canvas to notify administrators if a teacher does not input grades in their gradebooks let's say every 2 to 3 weeks?  We are just curious because it will help us with follow-up with specific teachers instead of us having to go into each teacher's gradebook for every subject." It'd be great if we could get that info from the new analytics tool or one of the admin reports.

[ChristianCrane]

Looks like a great update! Has there been any discussion involving attendance data? I'd love to integrate roll call attendance data with this analytics dashboard. We are often concerned with attendance rates at my University and having all of that data brought into one place would be great!

[patrickdorls]

This looks like an exciting update! Are there any webinars upcoming sharing ideas about how to use this as an admin?

[Charles_Barbour]

@audra_agnellyI'm also curious if there's a way to identify the amount of time it takes for instructors to return grades to students.

After the assignment's due date, how long before students get their grades and how much feedback is provided?

[carlycurran]

@audra_agnelly, @ChristianCrane and @Charles_Barbour -- these are all great suggestions! Adding them to our list for discovery. Thanks for the clear explanations and reasons why you'd like to see these ideas implemented. Also, just a plug that I would love to see them added to our new Ideas and Themes. 

@patrickdorls thanks! I will make a note with our product marketing team that we've got interest in webinars 🎊

[NickKays]

One challenge we have with this particular feature is that because the permission is tied into the "Analytics - View Pages" permission. As we have a few account roles that already have this permission so they can easily see course analytics and the fairly basic analytics at the sub-account level, enabling the Admin Analytics immediately gives these users access to the Admin Analytics for the sub-accounts where they currently have admin roles with the 'Analytics - View Pages' permission. 

From a permissions perspective, it would be much easier to have the "Admin Analytics" as a separate permission to the "Analytics - View Pages" so we can still allow some account admin roles to have access to Course level analytics but not to analytics at the entire sub-account level. 

[KathyPalm]

Good idea @NickKays . We would also benefit/prefer having a separate permission for this level of analytics!

[carlycurran]

@KathyPalm @NickKays 

An account or sub-account admin must have both the Analytics - View Pages permission and the Grades - View All Grades permission. 

[DrDavidSutton]

I second an earlier request for admin analytics to include RSI data.  Being able to see when/how professors are engaging their students and having the data archived by Canvas would certainly make accountability measures easy to implement. 

One institution where I work has a dashboard for both faculty and administration that shows this information in a Faculty Dashboard, and it has made keeping people on track and engaged super easy.  The improvement to student retention and success makes such an addition a major desire.

[rachael_donalds]

Can we please have analytic tracking for different roles eg observer, teacher etc. That way we can track parent engagement.

[Maeve_McCooey]

@NickKays A great suggestion to allow the role to be attributed using a dedicated permission instead of tying it in with other permissions. Admin Analytics can give access to high volumes of user data and any additional security/governance controls that can protect user data would be very much welcome. 

[TrinaAltman]

I wholeheartedly second the suggestions by @NickKays and @Maeve_McCooey regarding having a specific permission to access Admin Analytics. In addition to the security and governance concerns (which are paramount), subaccount admins may need training to make sure they understand the data before they start using it or sharing it with their Leadership.

[SusanTremayne]

Excellent thank you. @carlycurran Is there capacity to add an overview within a faculty dashboard to drilldown on the actual time spent teaching in a specific course? 

P.S. @carlycurran are you still in TX? I lived close to San Antonio for a while  - loved it. 🙂

[carlycurran]

@NickKays @TrinaAltman @Maeve_McCooey I'm happy to tell you that a standalone permission is planned for Q3 of this year!

@SusanTremayne -- I would love to see that idea come through ideas and themes.
It's tough to estimate the actual time spent teaching (same way it's tricky to do that for students). What kinds of proxies would you look at in Canvas for that?

[TrinaAltman]

That's great news, @carlycurran. Thank you!!