This video describes how to use some of the Course Analytics tools to monitor student progress through the course and to find students who are struggling to get started or keep up in the course.
Watch the video here: (length = 2:45)
Canvas has several tools that help teachers check up on students and view their progress throughout a course.
To start with, to help students begin the class well, we recommend sending an email to all of the students on the very first day, after the class is published, welcoming them to the online class, and telling them what to do to get started, and giving them a link to the class.
Then after that, it's especially important to check on students in the first few days, just to make sure that everyone has logged in and knows that they're in the class. You can do this by going to "People" and looking at the "Last Activity" and "Total Activity" columns. If someone hasn't even logged in to the class after a few days, you should send them a personal email, reminding them what to do to get started.
Once the class gets started, you can view the "Course Analytics" section for much more detailed information. Go to the course home page and click the "View Course Analytics" button.
These first few sections show some aggregated statistics about the whole class. The "Activity by Date" section shows a weekly graph of how often students are interacting with your class by either viewing a page or participating by submitting an assignment or making a discussion post. In this example, you can see that these two weeks were breaks from school.
The "Submissions" section shows one bar per assignment, showing you the proportion of on-time, late, or missing assignments.
The "Grades" section shows you the spread of grades for each assignment in a standard box and whisker plot. You can see the highest and lowest scores, and this little line is the median score.
In the bottom section, there's an alphabetical list of students with some stats for each student. You can use this to see if someone isn't participating as much as the rest of the students. In those cases, it would probably be good to contact those students.
You can also click on a student's name for a detailed look at their statistics, showing just that student's activity in the course. This "Submissions" graph gives you a visual representation of how a student is doing throughout the semester. For example, if a student was turning in assignments regularly, then stopped, it would be obvious in this view. You can also see this student's grades compared to the class averages.
Another way to keep track of student progress is to set up prerequisites and requirements for Modules, so that students have to view certain material before moving on, or complete some task, such as scoring some minimum score on a test before they're allowed to continue.
If you have these set up, you can check on the students in the Modules section by clicking on the "View Progress" button, then clicking on the student's name to see their current progress through the course.
So, those are some ways to track student progress. It's important to check these regularly so that you can quickly follow up with students who may be falling behind. In face-to-face classes, a student's absence may be more visible. In online classes, it might not be that obvious, unless we make good use of these course analytics tools.