The Canvas learning management system was designed to support teaching and learning, not to detect academic dishonesty.
The Poorvu Center, along with Instructure, the company that makes Canvas, recommends against using Canvas activity logs (e.g., quiz action logs or New Analytics page views) as primary evidence in proving or disproving academic dishonesty related questions.
The Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning has fielded an increase in requests for Canvas data logs to monitor student activity during online assessments. However, Canvas activity log data may be unreliable as evidence of specific behaviors during defined time periods. For example, the official Canvas guide for the New Analytics dashboard indicates that data from the page views report, which provides insights on the number of times students view Canvas course pages, can be imprecise due to factors such as device settings and network connection.
… Page view data is based on requests to the server, use page view data only as a good approximation to activity and not an absolute metric.
Canvas Support Guides | What is New Analytics?
While Canvas analytics, in aggregate, can provide valuable insights into behaviors correlated with success in a course—such as which materials students access and how much time they spend on them—these analytics are not effective for monitoring individual student actions with the level of precision necessary for the data to be considered suitable evidence of student action or inaction.
Instructors can request a consultation to discuss strategies for Canvas usage and course assignment development.
Instructors can contact Canvas @ Yale for more information about Canvas’s data and activity logs.