My Learning Analytics (MyLA) is a dashboard that provides students with information about their engagement with course materials and resources, assignments, and grades in a Canvas course. A set of three learning analytics data visualizations have been designed to:
- reveal behavioral patterns associated with good learning skills,
- guide decisions about actions students can take that may improve their academic outcomes,
- and provide a transparent view of students’ course standing.
For ease of use, these visualizations can be accessed directly from the Canvas course navigation or from the relevant page view in Canvas, placing the links where the students already go for course-related information.
MyLA was developed as a collaborative project between researchers from the School of Information and School of Education partnering with ITS Teaching & Learning.
Available Visualizations
Instructors determine which visualizations to use with a Canvas course, so students may see different sets of visualizations for different courses.
Resources Accessed: Students can see which files, videos, and other resources are popular in the course and accessed most often by classmates. Resources are color-coded in blue if the student has accessed them or gray if they have not. File names have active links to immediately open resources they have missed.
Assignment Planning: Students can view their progress and upcoming assignments with a Grade Progress bar and Assignments Due by Date list. Students can also set course and assignment goals to help with their course planning and engagement.
Grade Distribution: This visualization provides a bar chart that shows the distribution of grades in the class along with the number of students in the class and the average and median grades. This visualization has been designed to protect student privacy by binning low outlier grades.
Faculty: Include MyLA in Your Canvas Course
Faculty can add MyLA to any Canvas course by enabling it from the Navigation items under the course settings. Once MyLA has been added to a course, instructors can select which visualizations to use by clicking a checkbox for each view. The three views are intended to be used together, but faculty can turn off any of the three views that may not fit their course design.
Learn more about using MyLA in the Information for Faculty section of this site. Learn more about MyLA and the design approach in the support section of this site.