Automatically populating home page or syllabus?

[abunag]

Hi All,

I've been tasked with a bit of a hot potato, and I was hoping anyone else out there already set something like this up.  Our provost wants to populate all new courses with a syllabus template.  That's pretty straight-forward with an API triggered import of a template course.  But now she also would like to see the course description (from the course catalog) autopopulate in the syllabus, or appear on the course front page.

Anyone tried something like this?  Suggestions, comments, or general statements about dogs are welcome.

[awilliams]

I know there are API endpoints for GETting and PUTting content from/on pages. It does sound like you're going to want a reliable DB of those course descriptions... Sorry I can't be more helpful at this time but I'll be following along.

[dgrobani]

We recently launched SyllaBot, which pulls data from Canvas, our SIS, and our outcomes repository and drops it into a  syllabus template. The Python code for it is here. Custom JavaScript embeds a URL into every current course's syllabus page to download that course's syllabus.

[karan_didwani]

Hi Daniel,

Your solution sounds interesting, I would like to implement that and try it for one of my course. However, after checking the GitHub Repo, I could not find any implementation guidelines or steps which I could follow to leverage your code.

I could really use some help in any form to set up the right environment and execute the application.

Thanks in advance

[dgrobani]

Karan,

One the reasons I procrastinated for years before finally putting my code on GitHub was not having the time or resources to adequately comment or document the code or to support its use. The only guidance I'm able to offer is that you'll need to do at least all this:

1. Download and install Python on your computer.
2. Install the requests and docx-mailmerge Python libraries.
3. Download the entirety of my code.
4. Edit the "canvas" and "directories" sections of the /core/config.json file to reflect your institution's details.
5. Edit the term_data() function in /core/terms.py to reflect your institution's term id's.
6. Edit the program_data() function in /core/accounts.py to reflect your institution's account id's.
7. Comment out the references to boto3 in syllabi/syllabot.py that upload the syllabi to AWS S3.
8. Edit syllabot.docx to format the syllabus according to your own template.
9. Direct Python to execute the syllabi/syllabot.py file.

Also, you should know that my code is highly dependent on my institution's environment. It pulls in data from our SIS (PowerCampus) and our custom outcomes repository, and won't work in your environment without substantial modifications.

Sorry I can't be more helpful!

[karan_didwani]

Hi Daniel,

Thank you so much for finding time to reply and provide all these details.

I will try these steps out with the substantial changes needed and let's see if it works .

[a_craik]

Hi Anthony

I am intrigued - when you say "That's pretty straight-forward with an API triggered import of a template course", do you mean that this is all automated... as in you have an API that runs regularly to detect when a new course has been created and this then triggers another API to do a course copy of your template course onto the new course? Because if so, this is exactly what I'm trying to ascertain how to do!