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Understanding Behavioral Insights in Codio

Jason Carroll Updated by Jason Carroll

What Is Behavioral Insights?

Behavioral Insights (BI) is a feature in Codio that shows patterns in how a student worked on a coding assignment - how long they spent, how their edits were paced, and whether text was pasted in from outside the assignment. It's designed to help you spot two kinds of things:

  • Possible academic integrity concerns, like a solution that was copied in rather than written.
  • Possible student struggle - for example, a student spending an unusually long time with very few edits.

BI is a starting point for a closer look, not a final verdict. If something looks flagged, it's worth checking the details before drawing conclusions - there can be legitimate explanations for unusual-looking activity.

Where Is It Available?

BI is only turned on for some courses right now - specifically, courses that use Codio's standard built-in code editor. It is not currently enabled for courses built on JupyterLab or CodioStudio, since those environments don't currently give BI the data it needs to work reliably.

How to Access Behavioral Insights

If your course has BI enabled, here's how to view it for a student:

  1. Navigate to your course in Canvas.
  2. Open the Overview tab in the left-side navigation.
  3. Go to the Progress tab.
  4. Find the Behavior column.
  5. Click the indicator next to a student's name to open their Behavioral Insights panel.

Accessing Behavioral Insights from the Canvas Progress tab

What the indicator colors mean

Behavior column indicators - green means nothing unusual was flagged; yellow/orange and red mean one or more thresholds were triggered and are worth a closer look

When something is flagged, the relevant chart inside the BI panel will be outlined and include a short explanation of what triggered it.

Example: What Honest Work Looks Like

Here's a normal, honest submission for reference.

Time spent and rate of edits - both within a typical range

The student spent about 4 minutes on this short exercise, with an edit rate of around 1.55 characters per second - consistent with someone actively typing and revising, not pasting in a finished answer.

A realistic mix of coding and debugging time, no external paste activity, and a normal pattern of insertions and revisions

You can also open the behavioral player, which replays the student's work over time - useful for confirming that code was built up gradually rather than dropped in all at once.

The behavioral player lets you step through a student's work over time, including file changes, paste events, and test-run actions

Example: A Flagged Submission

For comparison, here's what a flagged submission looks like.

A red indicator means one or more thresholds were exceeded

Very low time spent paired with a very high edit rate - a pattern that can suggest pasted-in work

22 lines pasted from an external source in a single event — the History of External Pastes chart makes this visible

In this example, the time spent was very short and the edit rate was very high - together, a pattern that can point to a large block of text being pasted in rather than written. The external paste chart for this submission also shows a sizable paste event, which adds to the picture.

Before treating a flag as a conclusion, it's worth keeping a few things in mind: students sometimes have legitimate reasons for activity that looks unusual - for example, if they transferred into the course from another cohort and already had work completed, or if they're allowed to write code in an outside editor and paste it in. A flag is a signal to look closer using the behavioral player, not an automatic finding.

A Note on False Flags

If your course uses JupyterLab or CodioStudio (RStudio), you likely won't see Behavioral Insights enabled yet - see Where Is It Available above. This is intentional: in these environments, BI currently can't reliably capture editing activity, which can make completely legitimate work appear flagged.

Questions?

If you have questions about a specific flag or need help interpreting your course's Behavioral Insights, reach out to your ITG contact.

Resources

Codio documentation: Behavior Insights

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