Track user interaction: custom page visits and navbar/homepage changes

Judit.T.2921

We are building a custom widget that offers users a simple way to customize their course. Among others, users can choose between different navbar and homepage options for their course.
We display this widget on some of our course homepages in Brightspace.
A more detailed version of this widget can be opened on a separate custom page.

We wonder if there are any ways to track usage of this widget, specifically:

• how many users interact with our full (detailed) widget – with other words: how many users open our custom page?
• how many users changed their course navbar or homepage to a different one, other than the default one?

We have our own solution to change the navbar and homepage. But behind the scenes we just do the same as what the Apply button does when users select a different homepage/navbar as their active one on their course.

Of course, we can implement our own tracking solution and save data in our own database.
But if there is any way to leverage existing tracking/analytics solutions provided by D2L, we would definitely try that first.
We are also very interested in other individual/custom solutions.

Justin.B.253

@Judit.T.2921 I am very interested to hear about how you create the widget and custom page to do this. I suggested through a PIE request for D2L to build API's for Navigation bars and Homepages and it was shot down. I didn't think there was a way other than using API calls, so I would be very interested in hearing more.

I build a lot of custom pages, reports and dashboards, you don't think you can track the usage of the widget directly in D2L. But if you are building your pages and widgets using JavaScript of similar, you could send data to a safe and free tiered database like Supabase. We use Supabase for writing and reading Announcements and Updates that show on our custom Admin and Faculty Dashboards we built inside D2L. For you, every click through, it would send the data point you need to your database table where then you could write a custom report inside D2L to retrieve that data.

You could push this one step forward and write the userid from D2L to that database along with the timestamp and usage from the widget. Then build a report inside D2L that can extract that userid and then rebuild the personal identification points needed, like name, orgdefinedid, and email from within D2L to solve any security issues while providing a very well structured report.