Accessing Course Access Report

The Course Access Report allows instructors to download the student activity logs for the entire course duration. 

The report does not list all the users' clicks nor typing/input activity. Rather, the report tells you how many times a student has viewed or participated in a particular content item.

You can also access an easier-to-view user access report on an individual student basis, which will be helpful to narrow down a specific student's activities in the course.

How to Access the Report

  1. Go to Courses on the left side panel of Canvas.

  2. Select your Course.

  3. Click on People.

  4. Just below the Student View on the top right hand corner, click the 3 vertical dots and select Course Access Report.

The report is in CSV format, which has the following field columns:

Column header

Explanation

Column header

Explanation

User ID

Canvas User ID.  This is the unique ID of a student.

Full Name

Full name of the student.

Sortable Name

The name by which Canvas sorts names in a list.

Category

The asset category type such as announcements, assignments, collaborations, conferences, external_urls, files, grades, home, modules, quizzes, roster, topics and wiki.

Class

The asset class name such as announcement, assignment, attachment, content_tag, discussion_topic, google_docs_collaboration, quizzes/quiz, student_enrollment, teacher_enrollment, and wiki_page.

Title

The content name.

Views

Thee number of times the student viewed the content.  For discussions, this would be the number of times they went in and viewed the discussion. 

Last Access

The last time the student viewed or participated.  The value shown will be in date and time format.

First Access

The first time the student viewed or participated.  The value shown will be in date and time format.

Action

It is either view or participate, as values.  For any action made as edits, save and submits, it will be under participate.  Otherwise, the value will be view for any course function that the student has viewed.  

Code

The unique identifier for each content piece.  E.g. assignment_8556874 identifies this as assignment with a Canvas ID of 8556874.

Group Code

A way of categorizing and organizing data.  It does not refer to Groups. For example, there is an assignment_group_### group code field that appears to represent which assignment group the item belongs to.

Context Type

Either Course or Group and relates to the Context ID to determine exactly which course or group.

Context ID

Either Course or Group ID for the course.  It is used in conjunction with the Context Type.

Login ID

The ID that the user uses to log into Canvas.

Email

The student's NUS email address.

Section

The name of the section the student is enrolled in.  You may find a delimited list if the student is enrolled in multiple sections.

Section IDs

The ID of the section the student is enrolled in.  You may find a delimited list if the student is enrolled in multiple sections.

SIS Section ID

The Section ID supplied by the Student Information System (SIS).

SIS User ID

The unique ID of the student in the SIS. This is the equivalent of the NUS-ID.

Last Activity

The last time the student accessed the course.

Total Activity

The total time in decimal hours.