Last week we posted our first update on Project Fizz, the Ed-Fi community effort project to unlock data from instructional systems. At that point, the project had published a utility that downloads key student activity metrics for Google Classroom, including interaction times, logins, and posts to the Classroom stream.
We have expanded that utility, and it now includes information on student assignments from Google Classroom, allowing an analyst or other user to determine which students have missing assignments.
We also released initial utilities for Canvas LMS. Similar to the Google Classroom tools, these use the Canvas API to download data on the status of student assignments, and also build a local file of data on daily student activity data, including information on daily logins, durations of those logins, and number of times course resources were accessed.
These tools are available in GitHub: Google Classroom utilities and Canvas LMS utilities.
These tools are early efforts for the community to build upon, so we welcome community contributions and feedback.
How is Project Fizz choosing which data to focus on?
Since LMS systems have a lot of data available, some may be wondering how we are selecting which data to download initially in these tools. The short answer is that we are focusing on 2 kinds of data: data on the status of student assignments and data on online “classroom presence”, usually seen via events like logins, accesses to an online space, or some non-assignment participation. We focused on these after talking to a variety of Ed-Fi community members and booking at several examples of early dashboards built in Spring 2020 following early in-person school shutdowns. Those conversations morphed into our Fix-It-Friday weekly meetings, where we continue to receive community guidance.
Along the way, we also took a look at data important to student attendance, as delineated by state DOE guidance. You can see that work here: Instructional System Data to Support SEA 2020-21 Attendance Policies
As always, we love to hear feedback, and if you have something to share, please send it in!
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