Good afternoon and welcome on today’s blog post on Canvas New Analytics.
What is New Analytics?
This ‘New Analytics’ tool is installed in Canvas and is visible within all Canvas courses you work in. The data is refreshed daily. As a result, the reporting of data can be delayed by up to 24 hours and the Course Activity Report data can be delayed by up to 40 hours. This is just something to be mindful of when reviewing engagement and participation.
Analytics are captured for active and completed student enrollments. Students which have been deleted or are inactive will no longer generate data within the module. This tool replaces the previous analytics feature of the course.
Note: For New Analytics to display in Canvas, 3rd-party cookies will need to be enabled within the browser settings.
What can I analyse?
In Canvas modules, there are four main sections where analytics are useful:
- Activity – let’s academics see page views and engagement within the course
- Submissions – let’s academics see when students submit assignment on-time, late or not at all
- Grades – show the average and individual user results
- Student Analytics – highlights the page views, participations, assignments and current grade(s) for students enrolled on the module
If you’re interested in page views and other metrics, the figure collected are the total number of engagements across all devices. New Analytics gives academics opportunity to view average course grades of student submissions. It uses an interactive table or chart graph and data is only viewable, it can’t be amended.

In the above example, the blue line is the average student clicks with course content, the green and purple lines are two individuals on the course and their participation. At times, you can see either individuals’ line is above or below average and when clicks ‘peak’, this is times of assessment during the year.
New Analytics can be used to:
- View average course grades
- Compare course averages of students, sections or an individual assignment
- View average weekly online participation and engagement
- Compare the weekly course average of online analytics with individual students or sections
- Send message(s) to all/individual students based on grades / participation
- View individual students’ course grade and participation
- View and/or download reports regards missing, late or excused assignments and course activity
Why use analytics?
Use Canvas New Analytics to:
- Predict students grades and engagement with course content and tasks
- Find out which at-risk students need assistance
- Discover and plan your teaching strategies based on clicks
- See an overview of how students are progressing in your module
Once a module has completed, information on assignments (missing, late or excused), class rosters and course activity can be downloaded and analysed. Interestingly, on this module, teaching content was accessed many times by 57 students. This may have been in module previews or downloading the content to local devices.

Unfortunately, analytics can be skewed if students download everything to their local device. On Canvas, the student could appear as at-risk due to lack of analytics. Once content is offline, there is no way of knowing how much a student is engaging with the content. Overall, the student grade at the end of the year is the final analytic.
To learn a bit more about New Analytics, have a look at the Canvas video on the subject:
Next time
Tomorrow, we continue with a look at the ethics of analytics.
We hope you have a pleasant day. Please do join us then to learn more and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter: @MDBSelearn.
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