Assistance Needed for Pulling Data from External Platform to Canvas

[DeveshMishra]

We have another platform that stores most of our user information, such as attendance details. We would like to pull this information into Canvas. Since our platform is not LTI compliant and we cannot use a consumer key or similar details for integration, could you please advise on how we can retrieve this information and integrate it into Canvas LMS? We would appreciate any guidance or solutions you can provide.

@chriscas 

[DeveshMishra]

Hi, @chriscas Please look into this concern and provide an appropriate solution.

[chriscas]

Hi @DeveshMishra,

First, just to clear up any possible confusion, I wanted to make sure you knew that I do not work at Instructure, though I do monitor and moderate the Developers Group a bit as a Community Coach with some development background and experience.

With that said, if you wanted to import data into Canvas, the first thing you'd have to figure out is where you wanted that info stored and displayed.  The Canvas Roll Call attendance tool ands up creating an assignment which holds a calculated attendance score which can then be factored into the student's overall grade if the faculty wish.  There could be other approaches, but this is the first one that comes to mind for me.  If your platform isn't LTI compliant, you could do all the work with API scripts to move data form your attendance platform over to a Canvas assignment in each course.  How exactly you'd do that probably depends on what kind of info is stored in each system and how you can connect it together.  I can imagine code that runs daily looping through all canvas courses, listing enrollments, then checking your attendance database for updates for each enrollment.  Another approach would be to monitor the attendance tool for changes (especially if there is some sort of trigger functionality) and update Canvas as soon as attendance3 is taken (you'd know the assignment and user id or look them up).

Hope these suggestions help a bit.  Perhaps someone else will have some other thoughts as well.

-Chris