Enhancing the Canvas Experience Through the Canvas API

Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Alright. We'll go ahead and get started. Sorry about the the delay there. So I wanna first off, start by thanking everyone for being here.

I mean, you have you have limited time, especially at this conference, and I know some of you were waiting there, like it was a Taylor Swift concert. So, I really appreciate you being here that that really means a lot to to us. We're really glad to be able to share our time with you. I hope this slide was helpful to kind of give you an idea of, you know, what this session's kind of geared towards. You do not have to be really technical for this group, but I get a feeling a lot of you are, and I'm excited about So we're gonna get into learning a little bit more about you as we get through this.

We really wanna focus on the discussion section at the end of this, so you can all get out of that. So, this is called enhancing the the Canvas experience through the Canvas API. We'll introduce our team in just a moment. And, right here. So, I'm really excited about being able to share this slide.

Because, we're a really tight team. We've worked together for a long time. You know, I'm Nathan Chavez. We've got Janitha Smith and Josh Armstrong. They'll introduce themselves in a but this just shows how tight you are.

This is at my wedding. You know, it doesn't get any tighter than this. We've worked together for a long time. We built a really good working dynamic and I'm hoping that we can really show you through the structure of our team and our workflow how that works for us and how we take advantage of that. So, let's start with Janitha, if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself.

Sure. Hello, everyone. I'm Janitha I'm the lead applications administrator for most of our teaching and learning tools, and this is API related, so I'll just keep my role tight to that. I used the Canvas APIs as well as Canvas data, our SIS data, and any other integrated system data, basically to, create automated workflows that we use to support in our provisioning, our, data access and reporting needs, of that nature. I work closely with Josh.

I have the awesome privilege to work with him, mostly in the, consulting role and, you know, interpreting or translating the perceived need and then, you know, maybe sharing a few data sources and then sitting back and watching just work his magic. So I'm grateful for the opportunity to be here to share our experience. Hello? Hey, I'm Josh Arms, lead systems integrator at Wayne State University, and I do kind of a two fold My workload is twofold. A lot of Python programming for one off, data feeds, integrations, things that we need to do. And my main role is, web developer and creating, a lot of custom LTIs for Canvas and integrating canvas with other applications like echo three sixty or zoom, things like that.

And we'll get into that in a little bit. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I'm Nathan Chavez.

I'm the manager of team. So I'm probably the least technical of all of us. My, experience is more in a support and a project manager capacity, as a technical project manager and, working with a lot of, students managing a help desk, that sort of thing. And so we all work together and bring our skills together to make this work. And so So, moving forward, here's our agenda for today.

So one thing I just wanna point out, we've tried to make this really simple structure. We're gonna start out just by talking about flow, how we get our work done, how our day to day looks like, how we sort of structure, our team and everything that we're doing. Then we're gonna get into a little bit of a showcase. Show you some of the tools we've worked on in the past, some of the things that we're working on now, and the sort of the direction we're going towards in the future. In particular, I know a lot of you have seen some of our presentations in the past, so we're really, in here trying to showcase some new things that maybe haven't been shown out, to everybody.

And then finally, I want to get us into a discussion I'd really like to make sure we get to this part as soon as we can because I'd really like to pull out some thoughts from the audience and really start talking about some of the problems you're having and some of the things that you're working with with the API. So if you can, if I could plant a little seed at this point, think about something that maybe you have received back on that could be addressed with the API. Perhaps something you're working on now, maybe you need a little help to, to get to the next stage, or maybe something in terms of, you know, how you're working structurally, maybe some differences you can make there. So think about that. We'll be calling on you at the end to kind of get there.

Alright. So moving forward, now you've gotten a chance to kinda get to know us a little bit. I'd like to know all of you a little bit better, so it'd be helpful to know what kind of roles we're dealing with here. I know that this is education. Everybody has like six jabs.

So, you know, it's I know we're all kind of crossing the different paths in here, and I, I, I'm missing some space here. I know there's some titles I'm missing here. So first off, do we have any teachers? Yes. Yes. Thank you.

Thank you. And admins. Yes. Yes. Okay.

Excellent. Excellent. Anybody who's a developer, that's their primary role. Perfect. Perfect.

We're calling on all of you, at the end of today. Support people, help desk, kind of, that sort of thing. Okay. Okay. Instructional designers, that sort of thing.

Okay. Excellent. Excellent. And then managers. Alright.

I love it. I love it. We have a really, we have a really diverse group. A lot of technical people, so we can really get into it. So appreciate that, everybody.

So, okay. So we're gonna get into the workflow and talk about our team. So this this part of it's gonna kinda be structured into three sections. So the first the first part of it's gonna kinda be structured into three sections. So the first the first part is I'm going to talk about kind of what we're responsible for and how our team is sort of put together.

We see we have to do the support and the administration of Canvas, and that's that's a heavy lift for us for a small team, but that also provides an opportunity for us. We'll get into that. We we strive for continuous improvement. When continuous improvement or continuous improvement models, does that sound familiar to anybody? People have heard that before? Okay. Alright.

We'll get into that, and I'll explain a little bit more about the piece that I bring to that. And then finally, we'll talk about partnerships, maintaining partnerships, you know, how that can benefit you, especially when we're thinking about, like, resource and things that you can utilize that, you know, don't cost you anything. So, this is the sort of the our structure of our team. You've met, Josh and Geneva. They're sort of the, the core of the work that we're going to be talking about today with really the centering on Josh's at work.

But this is all a system. This is all together. You know, we, even though we have three really different areas that we all deal with, we all meet every day. We have our check-in. We keep that together.

And each side of it is influencing the other side. So the student interaction that they're getting through the LMS support help desk. That's influencing our work through academic applications and through our collaborations with the libraries. All of that is feeding into, our our work and how we're successful. So and as you can see, this is not a very large team.

So we have to really that's really a framework that we have to work within. We don't have a lot of people. We don't have a lot of resources. So when it comes to things like automating and things like that, we really have to to lean into that side of things. So, starting off talking about the support and the administration of Canvas.

So, who else has a structure like this, where you're your admins and your support people will kind of report through the same area. And we else okay. We've got a few that are like that. Okay. Okay.

So about maybe a third of you, Okay. So so from my perspective, I feel like that really brings us a lot. You know, that that brings us close to the work that people are doing. The fact that that we're meeting directly with, students, we're meeting directly with faculty, instructional designers, and working through their problems, collaborating with them. The fact that that's all to get together and closer really helps us to keep that communication together.

And that's I'll be talking a little bit about Agile in a minute. That kind of connects to that as well. And so the way we really see it is that that gives another channel for people to provide feedback and for people to tell us what's going on. And, you know, I think in a lot of cases, how many of you serve on committees for change management, you know, new projects, that kind of stuff? Exactly. How many of you are in committees with, like, the same ten people all the time, right? It's always like the same ten multimers with tenure, who are really good friends with their chair, and they always have a really good voice, in that.

This is kind of a way to open that up. Because really as long as you have the support number, as long as you have our email, your voice is coming to us, and we're talking about that every day. Know, we're talking about, okay, what were the challenges yesterday? What did we see? And many of our tools come out of that. You know, our cross listing tool comes purely out of faculty frustration, you know, that we got, and then we moved, that wasn't something that we envisioned. We got it from them.

Because they needed that, and we feel at it. So, that really provides that opportunity. And then really the, the last piece, you gotta have the muscle. Somebody's gotta do the code. So whether that means you know, you have a dedicated developer, which we are very, very fortunate to have, that we have, someone focused on that teaching and learning aspect of our workflow, but that's a huge thing.

If there's one thing that you can take back from this, go to your deans, go to your chairs, go to your leadership, and kind of tell that this opens up a whole new opportunity. Whether that means hiring developers, creating those skills and the people that already work you, that's gonna be a huge enhancement for what you're doing. Alright. Alright. So moving on.

So we talked a little bit about Agile. If I talk about Agile, or like scrum, that kind of stuff, that project management stuff. Does that sound familiar? Like, anybody is using that stuff? Okay. Anybody certified agile? Anybody? Alright. Alright.

We got one. Okay. Perfect. Perfect. So, so we're we're in the club.

The, so yeah, I'm sort of and agile, but I but the perspective I bring to it is a little different. So, so agile methodologies come from software development. And to really kind of simplify what it is is it's kind of, less focus on a long term, planning and more of a focus on shortening work cycles and increasing interaction the people you're working with. Now one thing I'll say is, and I'll sometimes say the word customers. Does anybody else use that when they when they're referring to the people that they're supporting or helping? Okay.

So just in case sounds funny or weird. We we've been saying that for years. So you might hear me say customers. And and when I say that, I mean, our faculty, our students, or even our staff that we're collaborating with and supporting so really agile is just a matter of, you know, where you might work for six months and then have that big meeting where you show off the product to the customer. Basically, that is shortening that, and you're now showing that maybe every week, maybe every two weeks, getting feedback, correcting, and then continuing that.

We bring that same mindset to the support aspect. And I really kinda think of that as like a daily cycle. So every we're thinking about what we did yesterday, what was successful, what worked, and then we're always thinking, okay, what, how can we make that easier? Can we document thing you just worked on, that sort of thing. Agile is really kind of in that realm. And I I've got this example here of we're lowercase Agile, not capital, because ultimately I try to bring the the the best parts of agile to our team, but my department, the college, the university is not agile, is not trying be.

And so really we have to kinda do it as much as we can within our area and within our scope. And we find that even when we're working customers, they don't know they're doing agile. We're just getting them to do it. So I find that that in an educational realm, no one's really trying to you to come up and hand them a new workflow or framework to to reshape the way they do things. It's more so you just have to incorporate it into the way that you work.

So we actually get a little bit of rejection from that. If we say like, Hey, here's this new productivity framework, do you want to use that? And people are like, no. But even though this solution is solid. And I I'm always saying this. We're always in a feedback cycle because, you know, the if you're evaluating, you're you're you're open to feedback, you're you're incorporating that and you're moving that into your work going forward.

That's something that we're always trying to bring to our work. So I would recommend that any of you, please for, agile, think about how it could work for you and your sort of project work and your day to day work. And that's obviously something we can talk about in discussion or you wanna get me after the presentation to talk more. And finally, strong collaborations. I'm glad I got a shout out for my guy here, Jonathan.

So the, I'll actually start there, your Instructure CSM is an amazing resource. We've had several throughout our time, and they've always been really supportive of us. Really amazing to work with. We'll connect you with other people. They will connect you with us.

If you're doing work and kind of it's coincide with what we're doing. We love talk to other people about what we're doing. That is a partnership that I would stress to really, really work on, you know, invest in that, and really they can really work with you. And and help you. Some of these other examples are like our office for teaching and learning.

We maintain a really close collaboration with them, and that really in an absence of resources, you know, the fact that you've supported people, the fact that they respect the work that you do, and you've, you've sort of, listened to that and incorporated them in the work you do, that's gonna come back later. When you're doing projects and when you're working on deadlines and things and you need more support from them, you're gonna get that. We've also found that working staff to staff, and, you know, we're a big university, siloed, we found that when we create these cross functional teams of staff to work together, they can really get a lot of stuff done. And the collaboration is really, really strong. And then I had one other shout out.

I know we got a couple of people here from the Michigan Canvas users group. Again, raise your hands to everybody. Yep. So again, if you don't have a user group, start one. If you don't know how to, ask us, well, we'll be happy to help you.

It's a great opportunity. We're doing a big conference this, October, and that's a huge opportunity. And that gives you a chance to connect with each other. In structure, we'll support you in that. So, please, I would recommend going that route.

And this is just a quick one. I just want to show this. We were last here in twenty nineteen. It's kind of my thank you. I'm glad we're here again, to be welcome back to present, but This is where, our collaboration with Instructure and our communication with them led to them featuring us in the keynote in twenty nineteen.

That's Jared Stein there. We you know, he was the AVP, and, they did a short video on our tutoring integration. So that's still on the Instructure site. We're not gonna get into that because I'd rather get into the discussion. Just wanted to say that, you know, the collaboration and the support from Instructure is really strong.

So, alright, moving on, we're gonna talk about our tool set a little bit. The way I'm gonna kind of talk about this is, you know, first we'll talk about this sort of, brief framework that we've kind of thought of of the API, obviously not the way to think of it. The, we're gonna show you a little bit of our current tools and then towards the end, get into some of our newer stuff, which is really focusing more on like an evaluation and assessment standpoint. And then, yeah, perfect. So, starting off, I kinda wanna see where people are at with API.

I know we've got a lot of technical folks. So let's let's start from, okay, who's like, what's an API? I don't know. I get a feeling nobody or a few Alright. Alright. Just a few.

So, perfect. Perfect. So beginners, people have maybe they've read the docs. They've gotten in there a little bit interested in it. Okay.

Okay. Intermediate, maybe you're working on something already. Maybe you've you've published something. Okay. Okay.

And then experts like Josh. Alright. Excellent. Excellent. Perfect.

So a really good a really good spread here. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So, so this is a basic framework of how we've thought a little bit about the API.

And this is a little bit, in order of how we've explored it and we've gone through it. So looking at this, we've sort of, started with, automating, and integrated systems together. And then as we've kinda gotten more advanced, we've moved into enhancing the system, like through our tutoring system, and then now we're getting into the value situation aspect, after that. So, obviously, this isn't the only way to think about the API, but we found this is a really great to think of, okay, these are the things that you can do. How can you kind of string those together and make something really interesting? So we'll show off a few of our tools here.

So start off with, this was something that was created. It came from, our honors college. They wanted a way to have all of their students enrolled in, of course, automatic Now, we already do our SIS stuff, but this was a little different. It wasn't tied to a semester or anything like that. They also, you know, they wanted to be able to insert, you know, stuff in our SAS, and it would just come through.

So Josh built this. It separates all the students by major into their own sections in a course, and he was able to solve that problem. You know, it was, it was a very simple thing they were doing this manually before, and it saved some time. And, and one of the things that that really, I wanna, I wanna connect this to, I really love the theme we have this year, making moments because this, this is literally making moments. You're saving time.

Like, people didn't have to do this after he did this tool. So moving on, same thing. This is, an outcomes export tool that, Josh has developed and this is really extensive. It out it out comes the results of all outcomes and rubrics, both institutionally and at the course or so account level if you have it. And so what it'll do is it'll export that all out.

This came from a need from our Genette assessment committee so that people could export they had entered their scores correctly, you know, because we used Canvas for tracking all that data. This was to make sure that came through. These, these tools really, they, they, they come from a need, and they, they, they're sort of nurtured by that collaboration. And then when you, you get to the end of it, you have a really, you have something really functional, and it it creates a connection with your campus even. You know, we've solved this problem and gotten even closer with our director of assessment based on that work.

Moving forward, so this is actually our course tool suite. I'm not gonna talk too much about this because people have seen this before, but this kind of shows our progression. As we've gotten to, more and more tools Josh made a suite and then integrated that as an LTI into Canvas. And so, this is sort of my part where I say, you know, I really should have put enhancing the Canvas experience through the API, LTI, Canvas data, all this other stuff, because we kinda cross those fences a lot. Would you say that's true for a lot a lot of you are, who are doing that work and development, are you very rarely working in just the API or a lot of times crossing into other things? Is that true for anybody else? Okay.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. Everything is connected. Yep.

So and then this is more of our institutional outcomes. This is kind of the next stage. We're going to be moving towards, programs being able to evaluate themselves and input their own outcomes into the system. We're really about giving people any type of Canvas admin access. So Josh has built this kind of pass through to allow them to input this data without any extra admin privileges.

And from there, the goal of this is in about a year or so. We will have people in our, assessment office who will be able to run a complete pro program evaluation that we did not have to have any hands on. So that's our goal. That's where we're moving towards. And this is, I wanna show this off for, some of the Geneva's men on.

This has been really valuable for us an LTI report, letting us know what people are actually using in the courses. It seems like a simple idea. It's really not at, especially when you've got things that are, that are implemented at an institution level, and maybe they're not, you know, their data is, you know, a little different in each course. Neither has had a lot of ingenuity to try to make this work. And no surprise, people love redirect.

Everybody does. So, yeah. Does that just count, like, if it's on the navigation or count? It's it's counting Janice If you got Yes. Oops. So, you know, it's a a combination of things.

They're going through assignments, going through modules. We're just walking through our data. So the navigation tools So, yeah. Absolutely. Excellent.

Thank you. Great question. This is the last thing. This is that tutoring integration that we've talked a lot about. Again, this is one that expands beyond the API.

It uses a lot of other, technologies as well. But this is directly integrated in the course. Josh has really, really developed this over the years, made it even, even better. We used to have it kind of at a dashboard level sort of for all the students, and now we've found it's even more effective if it's targeted into the specific courses so that students, if tutoring is available for that course, It's in there. It's available.

It tells you how many are there for you to be able to get an appointment, and it takes you right there. So you can see here, this next click, it just takes them to the new appointment with everything filled in based on whatever the course they came from, and then they just confirm then they have their appointment. We've seen this create a massive increase in not only the appointments that students are having, but we also needed to hire new tutors. The tutoring office is about two and a half times the size it was when we started this. So, yeah.

So that said, yeah, I know we started a little late. So we're getting a little late into discussion, but I want to get into this, and take as much time as we can. So really, this is the part where I want to kind of really just give this room the chance to sort of get, whatever you can out of the expertise we have here, and let's all get a conversation going. So first thing I want to start with, I plan see earlier. Does anybody have something that they're working on that they maybe wanna talk through, brainstorm a little bit? Something Here we go.

I'm trying to organize my API scripts, the little, like, one off things that I've written said I would like to make available to other people, but they're messy. I don't know if I should use GitHub to share them, or I'd be curious to know if anyone has any thoughts for organizing them. Perfect. Perfect. Yeah.

I would say GitHub is how we do everything internally. That's what we use. I find that to be the nicest way, you can share that out. That that's what I would recommend is GitHub. Okay.

Yeah. Go ahead. I've been thinking about it. We've learned something kind of interesting using the API calls through the custom JavaScript. So that an end user is calling the API, using their own credentials without having to pass a token anything.

So I just was wondering if other folks are doing that. Okay. The use case we had was we use catalog for some courses. When you register, courses get an expiration date, students applying. And so we put that course expiration date inside the course -- Cool.

-- and it lets them know visually making that API call. Hey, when does my section end? It's a close to the AI. So that's the use case we have. It's the only use case I have. Okay.

I was wondering if other use cases are out there for transcripts. Interesting. You're like putting text into Canvas Brain? Yeah. So I'm I'm taking JavaScript calls to get through, like, through theme editor. I'm putting the Okay.

So we Interesting. It puts a button in the settings of the course that allows, instructor to call an API to change the date of purchase patients that temporarily unlocks the course. So they can update the roster after it's closed or Sure. Whatever they want, the to if they to access a completed course. What it does is it changes the, end date of the course to a week later.

So it automatically relogs after a week. Cool. Nice. Nice. I was gonna add to that.

There's a APN call to mark all inbox messages that's read, but there's not a button for that. So that's another one that can be called on, like, the self user, whoever's logged in. So we kinda put like, in the inbox, a button. Mark all is red, and they just calls that. And we'll mark their thirteen thousand.

Nice. Nice. Nice. Oh, that's a great idea. Everybody steal that idea.

So in case you hadn't heard that, the, the developed, witching? Garen. Okay. Darren from where? Springfield Public Schools in Missouri. Okay. Springfield Public Schools in Missouri.

So, yeah, great idea. So there there isn't, and we've heard this feedback, and I we hadn't thought that. The, you can't mark everything as unread in the inbox, and they built a, in a solution for people to do that. So yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing.

Yep. Yep. Go here. There's there's you've done that with custom JavaScript. What sort of methodologies do you have in place for regression testing? When not with the Canvas releases, you know, every month.

Yep. Yeah. So, yeah, Fred, that was for, what kind of testing are you doing for for JavaScript, because Canvas is updating, and that kind of thing, a great, great question. Do you wanna talk about that? Because I think we've moved largely away from JavaScript. Yeah.

For that reason. Yeah. So, yeah, the, the only thing that we are using JavaScript for is, actually funny enough that the tutoring integration you saw uses the JavaScript file to basically read what course you're in and inject into, this is not the best methodology for this. This is just the one that worked for us. But, yeah, the JavaScript, basically, scans the page, grabs that, the bio fifteen hundred twenty two zero nine up at the top, uses that to determine what course you're in and injects, looks up, file that I have that keeps the numbers of available tutoring spots up to date looks at that and injects it into the page.

So that's really the only thing we're using, JavaScript four these days. We don't we kind of moved away from it. Okay. Real quick. Did anybody wanna talk about what they're doing with JavaScript real quick? I wanted to see.

Back there. Yep. We're using JavaScript to find multiple custom functions without having to go to external system board. So we have, integrated content searcher where we can search for for strength, word, in an entire forest. It's, like, got you.

We have, unused content script to identify, what content does not actually be used for the criteria that has it to eventually be back to and another, use case that actually goes into a little bit advanced is we have a old content editor where we can open up all of the assignments, all the content pages at the same time, and you can do a bulk, replace all, just the free price, and all of the content, and then it's update every single thing. Which is great for, like, course code changes where the course has been reevaluated and got a new code. So everywhere that code's at, you just go in and replace it. Stuff. Okay.

Little stuff like that, but keep the keep it entirely in side of Canvas instead of having to build an external functionality. Okay. Okay. So so if I can kinda sum that up, so so making, sort of bringing the development inside of Canvas, using the JavaScript and sort of pointing that at content to really sort of like, in a bulk and a mass way, make those updates and things. Yeah.

No, that's really, that's really great. Is, is anybody else doing anything like that? Yep. Okay. We got it. Yeah.

Let's go. Yeah. We have, one of the customizations we did was actually adding, like, a student resources link to the global navigation. Okay. Gotcha.

Gotcha over here. Resources linked to the global navigation. But then also, we have multiple JavaScript tools. When you click on the admin badge, the fly out will have the specific tools for a specific Canvas user ID since we restrict more of the danger tools to people with more experience. Yep.

But we do have a bulk find and replace -- Okay. -- tool that we developed. Bulk course published by term, and I think the really fun one is the bulk content search. So, yeah, there there are a couple of really neat things that we've developed, but I think that the custom global navs were like, the best thing ever because we bring students to it and we faculty to it all the time. Okay.

Nice. Nice. Nice. Yeah. The and I've I've feeling I've seen a couple of people things like that, the custom nav with JavaScript.

Anybody doing that? Okay. Okay. Yeah. I've seen a few as people are logged into Canvas. Yeah.

So, excellent. Yep. And if I can real quick to point that, the, the testing question, what are you doing for testing? Just, anything structured for to keep it up to date and things? For testing? Just for testing, you know, as Canvas updates, something on testing your JavaScript. We will just wait for the helpful. Okay.

There you go. There you go. You know what? Yep. Yeah. Mhmm.

Yep. Didn't wanna say it first, but, yeah, that's that's kind of what we do too. Yeah. You're helped us scoping on Saturday afternoon. No No.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go. Curious to know, you know, a lot of what I'm hearing is is sort of glow needs.

There's a need for search and replacement. Yeah. As smaller requests come in, but one the very much one off requests how do you prioritize those? How do you how do you tell someone like, no, this is actually a lot more development time than you just doing it yourself? I know for you. How are people managing those kinds of requests? It would be nice if we could. Mhmm.

And if I also Yep. That's that's and I got that from my boss. The first question is, well, who is it? You know, who's asking? You know, if the provost wants it, it'll be ready tomorrow. You know, it it's, really what we find we find some of the agile stuff works with that, because I'd, like, one I'm having my meetings with the customers who maybe want new projects to happen and things like that. I will bring up my board and be like, okay, this is what Josh is working on.

This is what Jeaneth is working on. And I can kind of, structure it so that, like, for instance, Josh is doing a lot of work with our testing and evaluation right now. Our assessment office is saying, Hey, we need some more development work. I'm talking to their manager and saying, Hey, as soon as this is off the board, we can go here. And so really kind of getting them in that planning process is helpful.

So you can kind of say like, Hey, here's what I'm working with, even get them to sort of be part of that prioritization process, that's what I found is really good. And the the agile mindset of, of that continuous interaction, where you're seeing them a lot and talking with them, you don't end up with that sort of surprise at the end of like, oh, wait, that wasn't what I wanted. That wasn't the direction I wanted to go. That really helps with that because then we don't have to time and that sort of thing. So, you know, I mean, I think we we've had instances where, like, if we do the needs assessment, it's really solid.

We don't any waste of time, we're getting all that feedback. If somebody else does and gives the stuff to us, we're rewriting something, you know, because we didn't have that customer action. So yeah. Good. And I think in addition to that, it's it's, I mean, kind of weighing that against, you know, how niche is it, you know, is this something that will solve a problem that maybe people didn't know existed and it's applicable to ninety percent of instructors, or is it really three people could use this? And you you gotta kinda balance that along with you know, all the other stuff that Nathan mentioned.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. Great question. Great question.

Let's go over here. Yep. Acting off of what nature said. On the previous slide you had, the Wayne State Course School. Sure.

Sure. Yeah. So some of these niche things, may already exist, and these people don't know if they exist, like, that top one process, of course. Is there something that's out there that you can But, let everyone know, like, hey, this is existing already, and you could be taking advantage of it. Gotcha.

So I will say the yeah. Yeah. So so as far as like sharing our stuff out through Git, that that that is, more on our future roadmap of being able to share more things. The one of the difficulties is with the integrations. Our stuff is very specific to our environment.

So it's not quite as transportable, but I don't know if you could talk a little you. Yeah. I mean, that's always been a big goal of mine is to get some of these, available to other people to use, but yeah, it's it's just really finding the time to it. We're so busy. And again, with such a small team, you know, it it's just hard to find the time to to get it done.

But yeah, really like to do that. And and a lot of these, you know, I I haven't I don't keep up with the vendor products out there. Some of these may have a new, you know, a solution out there. A lot of these came from needs, that were there when we first started, getting canvas, on our, our campus. And so I haven't really gone back and reevaluate.

They've just become our workflow. So there may even be something else out there that does this. But, yes, to answer your question, open sourcing these are definitely on our roadmap, and something we'd love do. Yep. And actually, I'd like to hone in on a little bit with the cross listing just to give you an idea of like where we went with that.

That came through the interactions with the support desk. The cross listing built into Canvas is confusing. It's, it's not an easy thing to do. You're like, it feels like inception when you're in a section, and then you're in a course, and you're in another section, like it's not. And so we had, I think we said we were fixing about fifty cross lists a semester.

That was about how many tickets we were getting through there. So then what josh built was basically train tracks. And so basically they go into the course, you know, they're already in the Canvas course here. So they go in, and they're inside of course tools. When they click on the cross list course, it's send them through a little form.

The first thing is, well, actually the first thing is the decision they don't have to make. It's what is your parent course? It's already the course you're in. Make the assumption that the course you navigated to and click that from is the course you want to use as the parent course. Then your options there are restricted to things you teach in the current term. And so at worst, you're gonna, like, cross list your own course wrong, your own sections wrong, and then we can undo that if we need to.

But now we're finding, we're only fixing about two or three of these per semester. And most of the time, it's because the department asks us to cross list before they assign instructors. So Yeah. And to piggyback off that, it's yeah. It really is a two fold.

We we are we do these things to both empower instructors to take ownership and do the things that they wanna do with their courses, not have to come to us to do it, but also do it in a way how we want them to. We can we can make sure everything is done the way that, you know, benefits us the most and them as well. And it's done consistently properly. You know, we can so we can keep tabs on that sort of stuff and make sure it's done correctly. So excellent.

And I wanted to hone in on what was the question earlier So that discussion, post aggregator. We built that for about five instructors who really did not wanna move to Canvas. But there were five instructors who were very influential, had tenure. Were in charge of the MBA program. And so we had find a way to do that.

Truthfully, it's a really simple tool. We don't really need it. I mean, it's very focused on their, workflow. But, you know, at that time, we were, getting people to adopt Canvas. We had to do what we could do to get people to bring in.

And, you know, if we can make the experience better for people, easier for people, and we can get them in, then it's it's worth it. It's worth it. So, yeah. Let's go, let's see I feel like it. Let's go over here.

Yep. First off, I would like to say, I really liked your dashboard that you had on integrations. And I'm wondering what options are available or what recommendation you would have for somebody who's trying to get that information out, but it doesn't have anything created yet. Okay. Gotcha.

Shanita? Oh, yeah, this is for the, he's asking about. So it said, like kind of how to get started with something like you know, how to, like, to start moving in in a direction of having like an LTI report like this. Would that be a? Specifically, but any way to get at that data would be, really help me out. Okay. Gotcha.

Yeah. I mean, so there is a a built in report in your admin section that looks at external tools. You can pull that report, but what we were finding is that, you know, Some LTIs are at the account level and so they only get counted once. It's not per course. It's just it's at that subaccount and it's just, you know, it doesn't show you which courses are using it.

So that's why we went deeper. And then, you know, we couldn't really use the request table because our are so huge. You don't keep that historical data at least. We don't we don't have, but, you know, the storage and all of that. So we just do the daily walk through.

All courses, content. I just wanted to add on to that real quick. There is actual a Canvas report for that non API user or just within the API, I call it the Canvas extension pack, reporting tools where it does go down to course level, for LTI reporting. And Okay. Gotcha.

Gotcha. So yeah. So he said, ask your CSM, they can provide some some assistance, some help. Kim? Thank you. Thank you.

You. Alright. Alright. Let's go over here. Okay.

Okay. Was, and I was wondering if anyone else has experience with pulling out, like, and hiding, built in quote on that issues with that. Okay. The question was if anybody has an experience, so we talked about like adding global items, but sort of hiding them or obscuring them. Yeah, anybody's got a good, let's let's get the guy back there and then we'll come to you.

Yeah. Carding permissions, role checker, because in the Canvas UI, if you've been assigned accountable role. It doesn't matter what permissions you have. Canvas sees you as being an active And that's not just not very helpful in trying to do your own custom restrictions. So I I had to build external, API tool to look up a user's actual and then send back to the doc, the custom dollars script a, this is what they should have access to.

I don't delete everything that they're not focused at. Okay. Oh, that's really interesting. So, yeah, so almost like, like another permissions layer in there. Yeah.

Between okay. So the the the permissions to write down is not quite the way that we it to be. Okay. It may apply to global navigation stuff. We primarily use it for stuff like import course content.

We want our faculty to be able to edit your content, but we don't want them put an, complete copy of their last term shell in their equivalent one from three terms ago. So you can't give them one permission without the other has the same permission to hand us right now. So we we have to give that, about this external thing to book up the permissions. Of course, you can't do it with your phone permissions because they might not be able to look that up. Gotcha.

Gotcha. No. That's a great point with, how many other people have ran into that issue with where someone has an admin role, even if this one little thing, and it kinda ruins them for doing other stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. As absolutely. Yeah. Let's go here. And that's where, you know, we ended up with a combination of, like, JavaScript inserting some sort of customized text that could be zeroed in on, and then using the job of the script to inject a CSS line that hides -- Okay.

-- like, you know, like, speaking about admins, I don't I I'm really the only one who should be editing terms since these are the dates. But once you give an elevated permission leveling, campus, they can access terms and play with them. So anyone who's not me or specified users has terms deleted on their admin menu. Okay. Gotcha.

So we've we've done that quite a bit where we just do, just It's gone off. Display was none for that. That's the CSS attribute. Okay. Excellent.

Excellent. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, thanks guys for sharing that for sharing. Yep.

Okay. So let's go. So I feel like I've been on this side. Okay. We got one more.

Alright. Last one. Let's go over here. To Rafael and how much effort was it? Okay. We were to you got the that's the million dollar.

We're gonna need another session. So who has made the tradition the transition FQL yet. I know we haven't. No. Okay.

We got it. I started. Okay. Okay. Okay.

New quizzes, I think, will use rest. I think they backtrack on things. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Alright. Alright. Well, thank you everybody. We're at time. I appreciate y'all being here. Thank you, Josh and Geneva for being our experts here.