This article highlights some methods for gleaning insights from the available reports inside the Canvas Learning Management System (by Instructure) for those with admin access. This is an early version of a forthcoming article in C2C Digital Magazine.

1. 10/6/2017 Gleaning Insights from Canvas LMS Reports
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C2C Digital Magazine (Fall 2017 / Winter 2018)
Colleague 2 Colleague, Author
C2C Digital Magazine
(Fall 2017 / Winter 2018)
1. Cover
2. Letter from the
Chair -- Kendra
Barker
3. Applying Decision
Trees to Online
Learning Data
4. Using UDOIT to
Increase Online
Course Accessibility
in Canvas LMS
5. Gleaning Insights
from Canvas LMS
Reports
6. Book Review:
Learner-Centered
Learning Designs
7. Book Review:
“Starter” Strategies
for Engaging Online
Learners
8. About Colleague 2
Colleague
9. Call for
Submissions -- Spring
/ Summer 2018 Issue
10. ...SIDLIT Awards
through the Years
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Gleaning Insights from Canvas LMS Reports
By Shalin Hai-Jew, Kansas State University
Figure 1: The Reports Tab in the Canvas LMS
As a follow-on work to the exploration of data from the K-State Online LMS Data Portal (powered by
Instructure’s Canvas), this article describes some of the possible public insights from the admin-accessible
reports. These reports are pre-collected data about some limited aspects of the LMS. This work provides some
insights into what is available. Some data visualizations are shared (albeit without leaking person-related
information.) (To get to the Reports, log in as Admin, go to Settings, and click on the Reports tab.)
The LMS’s Reports feature enables the user to change the term to either All Terms, Default Term, or a
particular Named Term (Figure 2). Some of the reports enable beginning with a customized time period...and /
or the defining of a customized start and end period. These are the main options available in terms of report
configurations.
Depending on the report type, there may be selections of included variables. Submittal of new report
configurations may be done easily in the dropdown, and the reports are returned very quickly. The idea is to
submit the request, click away from the site, and then return, and in many cases, the updated reports are ready
for download. (No email notifications were sent to indicate that the downloads were ready per se. In one of the
earlier trial runs, I waited on the emails and did not check back for hours...and so assumed that the actual
report-making took that long. Not so much. The K-State instance of the Canvas LMS is a hosted solution, so
the work was done on remote servers.) The reports download with some informative elements of the data table
name and the download date...but does not indicate the particular target terms in the name, so for proper and
easier handling, it would be good to include that information in the naming protocols.
The quick analyses done here were done with extant reports as the settings were pre-configured.
Main menu
View Recent
The Reports Tab in the Canvas LMS A
Details

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Some of the reports do not just download as a .csv file but download as a zip folder full of related .csv data
tables.
Figure 2: Configuration of Report Options
About Grade Exports
During Spring 2017, 123,985 grades were exported. The average current score was 83.61 (with 0s averaged in),
with a min-max range of -150 to 5725.5. The average final score was 75.49 (with 0s averaged in), and a min-
max range of -22.96 to 1544.05. In terms of the courses from which grades were exported, the ratio of “active”
ones to “concluded” ones were 4:1 (Figure 3). This might suggest that grades are exported while there is still
time to make changes and the issues are live.
Figure 3: Course States in Grade Export Data Set (Spring 2017)
Configuration of Report Options
Details
Course States in Grade Export Data Set (Spring 2017)
Details

3. 10/6/2017 Gleaning Insights from Canvas LMS Reports
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About Course Storage Space Usage
Interestingly, a majority of courses in this LMS instance use 0 MB of storage space followed by those using less
than 1,000 MB of storage. Only a handful of courses use between 5,000 MB to 30,000 MB. This may be an
indicator of proper LMS instance management given that there is a third-party service that handles video
hosting and delivery. Also, some social video hosting sites are used for some video handling. Social media sites
enabling crowd-sourced blogs, encyclopedias, and other elements are also external sources, which do not cost
in terms of storage space on the LMS. Other servers at the university host some learning-based websites.
Figure 4 summarizes the course storage frequency in descending order for 44,236 courses.
Figure 4: Course Storage in 44,236 Courses (in a Pareto Chart)
A listing of the course names mentioned for storage amount follows in Figure 5. These add a sense of color to
the statistic. All empty spaces were removed, so that the respective course names would reflect as one-grams or
unigrams, so they would be counted as units instead of separate pieces. Two items were removed by adding to
the stopwords list: “top” (short for “topic”) and “intro” (short for “introduction,” indicating the level of the
course).
Course Storage in 44,236 Courses (in a Pareto Chart) A
Details
Names of Courses Listed for Storage Measures (in a

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Figure 5: Names of Courses Listed for Storage Measures (in a Word Cloud)
About Developer Keys Activated in the LMS Instance
In the whole LMS instance lifespan, there were 69,775 individual moments when user access tokens were
activated, the most recent ones in August 2017 (the earliest ones from 2014). Figure 6 shows which ones were
the most popular in a word cloud (based on word frequency counts). All accounts were in the “active” state at
the time of the data extraction. The list of activators of developer keys were both known developers, faculty,
and some staff.
Figure 6: Activated User Tokens in the LMS Instance (in All Terms)
About Unused Courses
The reports section in the Canvas LMS enables a cumulative count of unused courses. These include 4,069
unused courses. Of these “unused” courses, 3,973 were “unpublished” and 67 were “active” (which probably
Details
Activated User Tokens in the LMS Instance (in All Terms)
Details

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means “published”). This data is from Fall 2015, in reference to courses created in June 2015. See Figure 7 for
more.
Figure 7: States of 4,069 Unused Courses in the LMS Instance (in Fall 2015)
To capture a sense of the unused courses, a word cloud was created (Figure 8) after closing the space gaps in
names so the respective names could be treated as one-grams or unigrams.
Figure 8: Names of Unused Courses in a Word Cloud by Frequency Count (Fall 2015)
About Student Outcomes in Assignments
States of 4,069 Unused Courses in the LMS Instance (in Fall 2015) A
Details
Names of Unused Courses in a Word Cloud by Frequency
Details

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Student outcomes extracted over “All Terms” found 231 outcomes linked to assignments. These were, in
descending order of frequency, as follows: Oral Communication, Foundational Skills, Written Communication,
Appropriate Usage, Diversity, Academic and Professional Integrity, Knowledge, and Critical Thinking. (Figure
9) These terms are representations in the data table, likely not the formal names.
Figure 9: Recorded Learning Outcomes from All Terms (in a Treemap Diagram)
A word cloud version of Figure 9 data follows.
Figure 10: Recorded Learning Outcome Results from All Terms (in a sparse Word Cloud)
Recorded Learning Outcomes from All Terms (in a Treemap Diagram) A
Details
Recorded Learning Outcome Results from All A
Details

7. 10/6/2017 Gleaning Insights from Canvas LMS Reports
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About Recently Deleted Courses
In Spring 2017, as of July 2017, there were 180 deleted courses. Some of the course names of these deleted
courses follow in Figure 11.
Figure 11: Recently Deleted Courses in a Word Tree by Frequency Counts (Spring 2017)
About Public Courses
So which of the courses were “public” in Spring 2017? According to the report data, there were 57 public
courses—which likely means made publicly visible in a broad sense (not “published” as in to the campus—
because the numbers would be much higher for the latter). Only five of the 57 public courses had formal start
dates: three in 2016 and two in 2017. In Figure 12, there seems to be some incoherence in the naming of some
public courses…or some machine auto-naming (without full human coherence).
Recently Deleted Courses in a Word Tree by Frequency Counts A
Details
Public Courses in the LMS Instance (Spring 2017) A

8. 10/6/2017 Gleaning Insights from Canvas LMS Reports
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Figure 12: Public Courses in the LMS Instance (Spring 2017)
About Tool Type Names
A Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) report is also available to indicate activated third-party tools. This
report does not include deleted objects (although it is possible to run the report with deleted objects included).
There were 3,377 activations of tool types. (For more on the IMS Global specification for learning tools
interoperability, please visit their site.)
Figure 13: Tool Type Names in the LTI Report Data Table (All Terms)
About Unpublished Courses
The list of unpublished courses in Summer 2017 include 1,255 courses. More about the course titles of these
unpublished courses are available in Figure 14.
Details
Tool Type Names in the LTI Report Data Table (All
Details
Unpublished Courses in a Word Cloud by Frequency Count

9. 10/6/2017 Gleaning Insights from Canvas LMS Reports
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Figure 14: Unpublished Courses in a Word Cloud by Frequency Count (Summer 2017)
This article gives a brief look at some of the information available from Reports through the Admin access in
the Canvas LMS. This is not a comprehensive overview of what’s available.
What was not included? There are data reports on SIS (student information system) exports. Another report
involves learners enrolled in courses who have had zero activity thus far. (This may be useful for learning
interventions, verification of participation for grant- and scholarship- releases, and so on.) There is a report for
the last time users touched the system. This captures not only the formal user name but some other related
data including IP (Internet protocol) addresses. There were some questionable entries, though, including a
person who had long retired from the school apparently seen to “access” the system.
The Reports section may well serve as an intermediary step between the front-end of the LMS and the data
portal backend (which contains much more data than these reports).
The reports themselves offer discretized approaches or angles to the available data. They include some a priori
structure in terms of assumed usages of the information. There is value in knowing the collected data,
particularly in teaching, learning, and reporting contexts. There generally has to be a larger context to make
sense of some of the data (except for the brief summary looks included here).
Some of the columns--time, identifier-based, and others--enable some querying across data tables; however,
this will be for another day.
Note: This is released with the permission of the system administrator / owner of the Canvas LMS instance at
Kansas State University, Scott Finkeldei.
About the Author
Shalin Hai-Jew works as an instructional designer at Kansas State University. She may be reached at
shalin@k-state.edu.
Details

10. 10/6/2017 Gleaning Insights from Canvas LMS Reports
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Version 8 of this page, updated 06 October 2017.
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