Monitor Online Attendance in Canvas

You’ve created a great online class. Your students have started the semester eagerly digging in to your course content and submitting assignments. Everything is going great, but is it really? Are you students really engage? Are they all even logging in to Canvas? With online instruction it can be challenging to gauge how engaged students are in your online course on a daily basis, especially if you only require assignments every few weeks. What are students doing in between those big assignments? Are they reading? Are they watching your videos? Are they discussion a course topic? Do they have smaller assessments to help keep them engaged weekly in your course? All of these additions would make a good online course and make it easy for you see how your students are doing on a weekly basis.

If you design an online course that requires some of these elements, you will be able to check online attendance in Canvas using the New Analytics tool. What exactly does online attendance track? It tracks posts to an announcement or discussion, assignment submissions, conferences using Big Blue Button, page creation, and quiz submissions. Previously the feature only tracked student log ins, but that didn’t really tell us anything. Students log in all the time, look at their failing grade, get discourage and leave again. That would previous count as attendance. But now they’ve turn on the criteria listed above, so it gives us a better picture of who’s doing what in the course.

Here’s a quick video showing you how to set up New Analytics in your Canvas courses and view online attendance.

An added note about assignments: Does the criteria Assignments: Student submits an assignment include assignments that use ‘external tool submission type’?

It depends. If the external tool is using the Canvas API endpoint for submission, it will count toward that criteria. For many tools that use assignment-level integration, this will be the case. 

However, if you are using a third-party tool that only passes average grades back to Canvas, those assignment submissions will likely not be included in the Online Attendance Criteria.