Introduction to Chip's sandbox
The contents of this sandbox are based on my own exploration of using the Canvas Learning Management System. It represents a work in progress (which some might view as a "stream of consciousness" rather than being well structured). Moreover, it is a personal sandbox, hence opinions expressed here or implied by links provided, do not represent the official views of KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Access to some of the material requires a KTH user account.
I welcome feedback on these pages and my other activities (https://people.kth.se/~maguire/). For information contact prof. em. Gerald Q. "Chip" Maguire Jr. at maguire@kth.se
Guide to some of the modules:
- Accessing Canvas using software - examples of how to access Canvas ranging from using curl with a URL to using python. One of the highlights is the page "Computing statistics for pages in a course" that uses python to fetch the pages of a course and builds a spreadsheet of readability scores using Erin Hengel's package Textatistic.
- Notes for migrating material and for maintaining prior years' material - concerns my adventures in migrating data from the existing KTH Social course pages to Canvas. This lead to an official migration procedure. This also contains some of the work on making an LTI tool to enable me to add citations and list of references to Canvas pages using Zotero. This work included reverse engineering (via Wireshark) the protocol used between the Zotero Word plugin and the ZoteroFirefox plugin. It was amazing to actually be able to add the citations to a page using a button in the rich content editor and a local LTI tool provider (a Sinatra web application) that access the ZoteroFirefox plugin. Unfortunately, this work is not yet complete, but hopefully, should be completed before summer. [I should note that I really hate using cut and paste, so one of my goals was to understand how to get pages from Canvas, edit them using emacs, and put them back. I'm still hoping to be able to use emacs as an external editor rather than TinyMCE [but this too is a work in progress.]
- Migrating quizzes from Bilda - I have made a program to help move quizzes exported from Bilda into Canvas
- Ladok3 Integration - Ladok3 is the latest version of the central grade administration system used by nearly all universities in Sweden. I am very eager to pre-populate the grade information from Canvas gradebooks into Ladok3. However, at the present time, the Ladok3 API is not public. Currently, I have been exploring how to get data out of Canvas via various python programs. This also includes various means of inserting data into the gradebook and getting it out later.
- Errors - is a module for placing pages about errors that I have found.
- SIS Imports - is a module with one page that I prepared before meeting the local team concerned with the Canvas implementation at KTH.
- Mixed language content is work on supporting multiple languages for course content. This work was done as I am a member of the KTH reference group on language issues (Språkkommittén) and KTH wishes to have English and Swedish language content in parallel.
- Adding functions to Canvas via browser plugin - inspired by https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-6061 Links to an external site. and https://community.canvaslms.com/events/1947-obtaining-access-report-data-for-an-entire-class Links to an external site. that add functionality to a Canvas page to create a CSV file, this module first looks at using browser add-ons to add functions to Canvas, with the goal of understanding how one could use this same mechanism to add functions when accessing the Ladok 3 web interface (specifically to take date from a CSV spreadsheet and insert grades into the appropriate place for each student).
- DiVA - a digital archive system
- Rapp - a results reporting system - this module has information about Rapp and the migration project that I have been working on.
- Degree projects -helpful hints - a video and some hints for examiners and supervisors
- ReadSpeaker experiments - with some examples of language and voices
- Adding captions to videos - adding captions to videos
- Kaktura related material - some useful information when working with Kaltura videos
- Entering text with accents and special characters - entering UTF-8 characters via various keyboard mappings (layouts) [with examples for Windows 10 and Linux]
- Templates
- Using Canvas in conjunction with a degree project
- Examples of Information for teachers and students Information for students taken from a degree project course.
- Downloading text submission and uploading a submission in docx - this module examines how to download a text submission and upload a submission in DOCX thus allowing markup via Speedgrade
- Presenting data (as a Wiki) - this module has the text transcript from the video added to it as well as the images and text from the slides that were used in a video on this topic - the idea is that this could replace the slides, video, captions, and transcript - especially when used with a suitable screen reader
- Help for degree project courses - provides some information about programs to help make it easier to administer degree project courses, some templates, and even a means to customize templates!