Hack night?

[dhulsey]

I see "hack night" on the schedule. In past years, there has been a hack night for programmers and a "course hack night" for non programmers. Will that continue thIs year? 

By the way, I fully expect to see Josh drop out of the ceiling in a tuxedo to "Extreme Ways" by Moby for his keynote.  

Note from the Community Team: Please note that we've got two active parallel discussions about Hack Night 2017 underway in this space, so please be sure to read through both, and contribute to either or both where necessary! The related conversation is at https://community.canvaslms.com/thread/17437-hack-night-at-instructurecon

[rconroy]

I've been wondering the same thing. The App didn't sync with the Schedule I had typed out from the Event website.  

[Stef_retired]

I have no idea,  @dhulsey , but I'll check with the Events Team to see if they can look into it.

[Stef_retired]

 @dhulsey , the Events Team is working on getting that squared away.

[dhulsey]

The events team is so awesome. You are too, stefaniesanders‌! 

[Stef_retired]

:smileyblush:

[swinter]

Hi. We are just using Canvas for the first year, so are going to the Con for the first time. What exactly IS Hack Night?

I do program code (webcode mainly), but I am not a full-time programmer. I do hack, but it isn't just code since I am also a designer. Most of my job is thinking out-of-the-box to make the square peg fit in the round hole. That is what we are having to do with Canvas and Catalog since we are not a conventional school. 

That said, what happens such that I need to choose to be on the programmer side or not? I also have two co-workers who know nothing about programming. Would they even enjoy this?

Also confused by the guy who said he has been going to this conference for seven years. I was told that this was only the second InstructureCon they have ever had.

Thanks,

Susan

[James]

 @swinter 

I'm emphasizing critical thinking in my statistics class this summer and I tell them not to believe everything they're told. Maybe the person who told you this was the second InstructureCon meant the second one in Keystone, Colorado, or the second one that person was attending. This year will be my 4th and I missed last year's. The three I went to were all in Park City, Utah. I can say that of all of the conferences I've been to, it has repeatedly been the best.

I can speak from the programmer side, although I'm not sure whether or not my experiences are typical. Hack night is not for everyone and from the brief description of yourself that you gave, I'm not sure that you would get much out of the programming aspect. Many of the people are there to change something about the way Canvas works or to figure out how to do something. They've got some project they've been working on that needs a jump start. Or perhaps they hope to get a software engineer interested who can make something happen. I've been every year with the intent of writing some great piece of code that I could do if I just had access to someone who knew how to do one piece. Alas, I never made that connection, but I did have fun anyway. The most social fun (for the shy guy) was probably connecting with people you've talked to in the Community or my CSM (who won't be able to make it this year). I've also been able to get Canvas people to look at how we do stuff and why my courses seem so slow (still haven't found an answer). As much as I want to learn things new things or accomplish great tasks that will make life so much easier, it seems that I end up giving back more than I get out of it. And that in itself is pleasurable for me, so I keep going.

As with many of the things going on, there are alternatives if you don't think you want to go to Hack Night. There's also Dinner and Casino Night and a Movie going on at the same time.

[swinter]

Hi. That was a really helpful response. I believe it was that it was the second one in Keystone, but the way it was said made it sound like it was the second one overall.

So we have a lot of projects that we have been trying to get Canvas/Catalog to fix, but they keep telling us 'no' even though we have customization money available. This might be a way for me to find someone to create needed tools that, for us, are primary to the way we teach. For example, we need to be able have an attendance to be federal government financial aid compatible, which is it absolutely not right now, through a time clock feature that the instructor can control and not the student (which is what one third-party group offers). And we need the ability for photos to be uploadable to assignments and to converted to a fixed size (common senses 101 tool). And we need to be able to view two assignments from two different people and those photos at the same time since they are all related.  

And Catalog is mostly useless to any school that isn't doing CE online training, where they don't ever give refunds, even though it was sold to us as having  different capability (sales people weren't lying, but admitted that they didn't really know the product AFTER we signed the contract, and it didn't work).

I do the custom programming for Catalog (after I learned the updated web code that I never needed before Canvas), so I might get something out of Hack. I haven't seen any places for me to do any code customization in Canvas though.

Thanks,

Susan

[James]

I can see why they keep telling you "no". Those are not trivial things and they would require changes to the Canvas core. That is, they aren't simply adding on features, it's a major rewrite of the way that things are done. Those kinds of projects (like quizzes, speedgrader, gradebook, and communications) take a long time and a lot of resources to rework. It isn't worth it to Canvas to dedicate that kind of engineering resources and pull them away from the other projects that are going on. They want to focus on their core product, not writing custom code or external apps for people that they then have to support. The best chance you have is to get an outside firm or programmer to write them for you.

Attendance has been a hot issue for years with the last date of attendance requirement. The Attendance Overhaul feature request, currently on product radar, was created by our Canvas Admin back in April 2015. For our online courses, we measure student participation in the course -- participation as measured by submitting something, not just logging in.

When you say uploading photos to an assignment, do you mean in addition to the assignment itself or as the sole submission to the assignment?  One could upload a photo to an assignment, but the back-end support is not there for processing multiple attachments to an assignment. One approach might be to have the students submit the photo first and the document second. It might be able to be handled the other way around, but Canvas defaults to showing the last submission when there are multiple ones. Then, on the screens where you need the photo shown as well as the assignment, you could put in some custom JavaScript that would fetch the additional image and add it to the assignment.

The two-assignments, two-photos thing is way outside the realm of anything that Canvas can do with its core functionality. It's not setup to handle multiple attachments as part of the same submission, let alone displaying two student's assignments side by side. There's nothing that I'm aware of that would keep someone from writing code that would load the additional assignment and photo when a page is loaded (it might get crowded on the screen), but through API calls it could probably be done. You would have to modify the existing behavior on the page, though, as you're not going to be able to add an extra route without access to the source code.

If you were self-hosting, you could make the changes and make them part of your Canvas, but if you have a hosted solution, then you would need to accomplish all of this through custom JavaScript.

I would not incorporate these into Canvas, though. Instead I would write an external app (LTI tool) that does photo / assignment / resize / dual display thing. Building it into Canvas through the custom JavaScript means that someone has to watch out for breaking changes every three weeks when a new beta release is made. I have written a lot of add-ons that individuals add to their browser to change the UI to work smoother for them. It's a long process and involves a lot of research into how Canvas generates things. Then, since it's all undocumented, it could change at any time without notice. When I visited with Instructure product managers in April, one of them suggested that I would do better to focus on external apps like the Google Sheets or an LTI rather than trying to make custom changes to the UI itself. I've got to agree with him in this case. Making it an external application means that you can communicate with Canvas through established and documented means that are rarely going to change.

No one is going to be able to throw this together at Hack Night; it's definitely more than a couple of hours of programming. I doubt any of the engineers from Instructure will touch it because they realize it's going to be really difficult to do with the current core and they know how hard it would be to get approval for the changes needed to do it. There is mention of Atomic Jolt and Cidi labs being co-sponsors and there may be other people willing to do programming, so hopefully you will be able to find someone who will take it on. Both of those companies are Canvas Partners, so you might reach out to them ahead of time instead of waiting for InstructureCon and Hack Night. That link shows other partners and allows you to filter by category to help find the right partner for what you need.

[swinter]

Hi,

So I didn't expect anyone at Hack to actual produce a solution, but I thought it might be a good place to find someone who could create some custom app for us. We have had no luck finding anyone so far. 

Attendance: I am on those discussions and no one seems to be addressing that COMTA is not in compliance with the government requirements. Fed financial aid only cares about two standards - academic grades and attendance based on credit hours or time in the actual classroom (which is what we have to use since we are not a college). They don't care about participation apart from how it affects those other standards. We are not an online class, so logging in is not helpful. We need the instructor (or student) to be able to time stamp when they are in and out of the physical classroom, and we need that to tie to Canvas to be able to print reports we must submit to the feds. Right now, we are still using paper. 

Photo sizing: For the dual assignments thing, we don't expect Canvas to come up with the custom solution. We know we need an app developer. But I am not the first to ask for uploaded photos with assignments to be converted to a standard size, just like they are with profile photos. Right now, it someone takes a photo on their iphone and uploads it to an assignment, it is practically unusable due to large file size when opened in a browser tab. You cannot alter the photo size on the phone. Canvas needs to automatically shrink photo files to some standard size when they are submitted in an assignment. 

Google Apps: We have considered using G Apps for some other solutions, but the problem with using Google Docs/Sheets/Etc., as confirmed by my rep and the online instructions, is that when they are submitted with an assignment, (1) they are converted to MS Office (so revision changes cannot be made), and (2) a copy does not automatically go into their My Files folder like with other uploads. It is essential that copies of all student submissions save a copy to their My Files since students will need those files for an eportfolio that they will submit to other instructors. So G Apps are not really as integrated as we hoped. 

So again, if Hack Night is a good way to meet potential third-party programmers, that may be our goal. 

Susan

[sbeck1]

 @swinter ‌, we actually have an application that might work for this. We would love the idea of being able to meet up at Hack Night to show you.

[swinter]

Great. Which 'this' are you referring to?

[dhulsey]

James gave a great answer, Susan. The nonprogramming folks are mostly people talking about how to get things done in Canvas, but it is more hands on than a session. People pull out their laptops and get to work while exchanging ideas with others. 

I hope that helps!

[jacoba_behunin]

 @swinter ‌, perhaps in addition to attending Hack Night (which I hope you do), we could set up a conversation to address your specific needs? Feel free to email me at jacoba.behunin@atomicjolt.com for a time to talk during the week. We have some tools that may be of interest that we are launching soon. 

[grahamb]

I’ll be at hack night as always to talk about open-source canvas and work on fixing some bugs. Look for the happy fun times open source canvas sign!

[dhulsey]

 @jacoba_behunin ‌, thanks for your work on hack night. I had a great time talking with some of the mobile engineers from Instructure. Thanks for the Atomic Jolt swag too!  

[jacoba_behunin]

 @dhulsey ‌ thanks for coming! Everyone, really, thanks for coming to #hacknight! I don't know about y'all, but I'm exhausted. Team Instructure did a great job! Thanks  @scottdennis ‌ Deactivated user‌ and Deactivated user‌ for all your help in setting up and organizing! See you again in 0018!

[scottdennis]

Thank you, Jacoba,

It was fun meeting you and seeing everyone who came to hack night.  To me it seemed like our most successful night yet and I already can't wait to see what happens next year.

[Bobby2]

Did someone collect all the cool ideas from this event Dallas ?

[dhulsey]

Probably not in any central way,  @Bobby2 ‌. I spent my time talking to a couple of mobile engineers from Instructure. I mostly made my case for the Teacher Tools app to continue, and because I was talking to the engineer who wrote it, he seemed pretty supportive and said he would talk to the product manager.  

[scottdennis]

Hey Bobby,

No, Dallas is correct.  Hack night is a free flowing unplanned or guided set of conversations.  People come and sit and talk about whatever they want to, which is why it is so much fun but its also chaotic and would be difficult to document.

[Stef_retired]

To close the circle here as best we can,  @scottdennis ‌,  @Bobby2 ‌, and  @dhulsey  (oh, the joy of having parallel conversations!), I noticed that  @jacoba_behunin ‌ is trying to herd all of the hack night conversations into a centralized resource.