Automated transfer from file system into a course

[SandaZG]

Has anyone written automation that scoops up new files from the file system and imports them into courses in Canvas under "Files"?

[chriscas]

Hi @SandaZG,

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "the file system"?  Canvas has a files area for each user and each course, but it sounds like you're referring to something else, so we'd need to know what this thing is to be able to provide much guidance.

Look forward to hearing back form you!

-Chris

[SandaZG]

Thank you for considering my post, Chris

I would like to have files in my Windows OS file system uploaded to the Files on Canvas under a course of my choice.

For example, I scan student work into a PDF and save the file someplace on my local machine. Instead of manually uploading that file into that student's Canvas course, I would like to run code that does that for me automatically. It could simply be a batch file using curl.exe or such.

Before writing code myself, I wanted to see if someone has already developed this automation. 

[James]

@SandaZG 

Yes.

This is one of the things I'm going to mention in my InstructureCon presentation. Don't come just for that as I'm not going to show people how to do it. The presentation is to inspire people to take needs that they have and think beyond what's capable with the web user interface. My part of the presentation will mostly be examples with stories. My wife is copresenting and going to talk about things built-in to Canvas that you can that you might not know about and then a couple of my canvancements that she really likes.

For the script to update files, I used Node JS (I don't really know Python, but something similar could be done there) to scan the local files, fetch the existing files in Canvas through the API, and then compare timestamps. It then updates any stale files in Canvas  In my case, I only want to update files, never add new ones.

If you have a library that handles connecting to the Canvas API, then the rest of the code wasn't very long. I had less than 90 lines of code to accomplish it, but it was specific to my needs. That is, I only wanted to upload PDF files that matched a certain regular expression for a single course.

I'm traveling right now on my way to InstrutureCon, so my ability to respond is limited.

[SandaZG]

Thank you, James, for spotting my question and responding. I won’t be a the InstructureCon, but will keep an eye on post-conference information.

[James]

@SandaZG 

My presentation won't share much more on the topic than what I gave here. It's very high-level, which is unusual for me.

The use case you provided Chris sounds a bit more complicated than mine. I'm automatically uploading lecture notes to Canvas every time I update them on my Windows machine. I only have one course and don't have to tie it to a specific student.

Are you uploading the files to maintain an archive of them with the course, submitting the work for the student, providing feedback to the students, or something else?

Other people have requested a way to bulk upload files (for submission feedback) that were not bulk downloaded. The problem is the naming scheme. Canvas needs to know which student and assignment the submission is for. If you were doing this for multiple courses, you would also need some way to identify the course the student belonged to.

If you are just archiving the work but the students don't need to be able to view it, then it could all be handled by the folder structure in Windows and as "simple" as mirroring the folder structure to Windows. I don't know specifically where anyone has done that, but I do know that people have asked for WebDAV capability with the Canvas filesystem. The answer is that Canvas doesn't support WebDAV, but searching for that might lead you to where someone has written and shared a script.

[SandaZG]

Hi, James, and thank you for your detailed answer. My school, Fusion Academy, provides one-on-one instruction. I have exactly one student in each Canvas course.

I scan classroom notes and homework daily for each student with my Genius Scan app into a PDF file. From there, that file gets exported to a student-specific subdirectory on my OneDrive. Next, I have to manually get into each Canvas course and click around to import that file into the corresponding course in order to publish and grade the work. The last part gets tedious and is the target of my desired automation. I hope to have time to implement it this summer, but was hopping someone here already has it or something similar.

Would you be willing to share your code? It may be a good starting point for me. Thanks,

Sanda