Instructions for finding out who/how many students accessed a particular file in your Canvas site.

View course access report for an individual user

Canvas basic reporting tells you who last viewed a particular document and number of times they viewed it – this information is in the Access Report which you can pull by going to the People tab, clicking on the three dots next to a student’s name, User Details and then selecting “Access Report”.

Unfortunately, this information is available for just one student at a time, so answering questions like “Who viewed the homework assignment?” becomes difficult — you need to go into each student individually to see that information. Also,  this report does not tell you when the first time the student accessed the document.

Obtaining and using Access Report data for an entire course

There is a way to view data for the entire course, and see how many students viewed a particular document. This detailed how-to page on Canvas’s site will show you how to install a button on the People page that will create a .CSV file of the Access Report data for all students enrolled in the course. It will then show some ways you can obtain useful information from that data using Microsoft Excel. Although much of this data could be obtained through Canvas Data, this script makes it available to the instructor in real-time.

This is a ONE time browser script install. once you do so successfully, you can view Access Report Data from the People tab for any course. This is part of what the report looks like:

Installation instructions:

1. Install a browser userscript manager Tampermonkey for Chrome/Firefox (Chrome is preferred)
2. Install the Access Report Data user script.
3. Edit line 5 of the script to point to NU’s canvas site: https://canvas.northwestern.edu/courses/*/users
   1. Open the Tampermonkey Dashboard by clicking on the icon in the upper right of your Chrome browser –> Dashboard
      
   2. Click on the Access Report Data title
      
   3. Edit line 5 to replace the Canvas url to https://canvas.northwestern.edu/courses/*/users
      
   4. Save changes to the script. Click File –> Save
      
4. In your Canvas course, go to the People page
5. Click on the 3 dots on the far right, and the Access Report Data option will appear
   
6. Click Access Report Data and an Excel file will download.

Have questions on the install?

Schedule a consultation with Ishrat Fatima for a detailed walkthrough.

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