Canvas - Exporting Student Course Access and Anonymous Course Access Reports [UW-Madison]
Note: Students are unique individuals and are more complex than their data - be sure to consider them holistically. Please review UW-Madison Learning Analytics Guiding Principles before continuing in this document.
Instructors can now get aggregated course-wide student access reports from Canvas. This document outlines how to export these from your course.WARNING: Student content and grades are regulated by FERPA. Please store data in accordance with University FERPA policies.
Before using a course access report, please review Canvas - Interpreting Course Access Reports [UW-Madison]
Two aggregate access reports are available to UW-Madison instructors via a third-party Canvas plug-in:
- Student Course Access report: provides an aggregated report with student names. Please be careful with this report: it includes sensitive FERPA information and should not be shared.
- Anonymous Course Access report: provides the same information, but does not include student names.
The Learn@UW-Madison team can only provide limited support for these reports. The reporting tools were developed by a third-party, so we have limited recourse for addressing bugs.
- In Canvas, navigate to your course and click on the People tool. To access access reports, you must be a teacher in the Canvas course.
- Click on the "three dot" menu icon in the upper right corner of the screen, and select Student Course Access or Anonymous Course Access to produce the desired report.
- Canvas will prompt you to download a CSV file. Save it to your computer, and open it with a CSV viewer (ex. Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets).
- These are two samples of the reporting output.
Canvas also provides built-in access reports, but these can only be created for an individual student. For more information, see How do I view the course access report for an individual student?.