[ARCHIVED] How to create custom assignment for 10K+ students

[akshay_sonvane]

The university wants to create a custom assignment for 10k+ students, who have been added to a specific course.

Based on each students university student id a link is generated. We want the students to get this link as there assignment. What is the best way to approach this problem.

Possible solutions thought of:

1) Assignments API allows to create a new assignment using the "assignment[group_category_id]"  to customise assignment for each group. Each group will only have one student. (With help of Group API create a separate group for each student)

[kona]

Due to the technical nature of this question I'm going to share it with the Canvas Developers group in the Community. They are the ones that work with this side of Canvas and should hopefully be able to help! In addition, you might consider joining the Developers group and checking out some of their other resources/information!

[akshay_sonvane]

Will sure do. Thank you. @kona 

[James]

 @akshay_sonvane ‌,

Wow!

I would give serious thought to writing an LTI (external tool) that administered the assignment and then passed a grade back into Canvas. Then it would only be 1 grade in the gradebook instead of 10000 grades in the gradebook. It's also going to be easier to do any customization and randomization in your own software than it would be in Canvas.

You can even style your LTI to look like Canvas using the Canvas Style Guide.

This method would fail if the assignment is to actually complete a Canvas quiz so they get experience taking one or submitting an assignment to make sure they can do it. But if it's not Canvas specific, I'd really go the LTI route.

[akshay_sonvane]

Thanks for the reply.

All I want is a link to be shown to them so that they can click on it and access a survey. The assignment itself is ungraded, so no problems with that. It's just that the school board thinks that if the link is posted as an assignment then it will make them take the assignment and thereby fill the survey. The only problem is that for each student id we have a different survey link, which is to be sent to them as an assignment.

[dhulsey]

I believe there are some course evaluation tools that integrate with Canvas that could accomplish this, so you might check the list of available apps, or perhaps something like survey monkey would work? 

[akshay_sonvane]

I did try finding LTI apps that could solve the problem. But, sadly couldn't find one that could allow me to create a separate assignment for 10K students based on there student id.

[James · Accepted solution]

I wasn't thinking of using a pre-made LTI -- guess that's the programmer in me, always reinventing the wheel. The good news is that if you need it to just be a link, then that would be a fairly short LTI to write using some of the existing libraries that are out there.

The student SIS id can be passed to an LTI if the privacy on the LTI is set to public. It's returned as lis_person_sourcedid. The LTI could be a very reasonably simple script to look up (or generate) the link to the survey. Our student orientation has an LTI like this that I wrote -- I take the SIS from Canvas and save the results of a time-management survey keyed off their SIS ID.

You might even be able to have it automatically redirect them to the correct page based on the link, rather than just providing the link.

Another option would be to do this from within Canvas using custom JavaScript that you put into your global file, but make sure that only runs on a single page to avoid needless calls. The problem here is that within Canvas, students probably don't have permissions to read the SIS information, so a script running from within Canvas wouldn't know their student ID. There is an ENV.current_user object available to scripts and it contains their name, Canvas ID (not SIS Id), avatar image url, and html url to their about page. There are also ENV.USER_EMAIL that should be available that could be used as a key that will hopefully be unique.

So, I could see something like this possibly working:

1. Create an assignment in Canvas that provides instructions and has a place for a link, but no link. Perhaps instructions to "wait while we generate the link". Give it an HTML id= attribute so you can easily refer to it in the programming and make sure it's available for use before changing it.
2. Check to make sure you're on the right page. If so continue, otherwise return.
3. Take their ENV.USER_EMAIL value and make an AJAX call to another server that will use it to lookup or generate the link that is needed.
4. If that returns successfully, then alter the existing content of the page to provide the link. If it fails, then you might change the message to be some kind of useful message about trying again later or contacting somebody for help.

If the link could be generated by information already exposed to the web page by Canvas, you wouldn't need to mess with the AJAX call.

[akshay_sonvane]

Thank you so much for the detailed reply.

Your reply rekindled the programmer in me.

I was reluctant to use the LTI app because there was a learning curve attached to it (or so I thought) but the @Canvas guys have created a great course around it which really helped.

Finally, I took your advice and created a simple LTI app which automatically redirects the students to the right link.

[James]

I'm glad you got the LTI working. LTI can have some security built-in by design and that was going to be harder to do with JavaScript because the source code is available. If anything other than a link was returned, it could expose information, and even returning a link without verification of who is making the request could allow one user to complete the survey for anyone (or everyone) else.  I think the LTI is the better all-around solution and if you want to make it graded for clicking on it, you could.

[maguire]

This question of customized assignment here and in https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Question-Forum/Customize-Assignment-with-student-ID-number... prompted me to think about a non.-LTI way (as I find it difficult/impossible to get LTI applications approved at my university) for documents that are to be submitted. Personally, I think that the LTI solution is wonderful, but non-LTI solutions do not have to face the scrutiny of LTI applications.

A differentiated assignment is not a good solution when there are lots of students, as each target generates yet another column in the grade book. Logically, this is a poor solution when the goal really is to have a single assignment but with different content presented to each student.

I have been thinking about how to have a preconfigured document that is unique for a student and comes configured for this student. For example, due to GDPR we have a form that students need to submit to give the university permission to make the full-text of their thesis available by the digital archive (otherwise people have to request printed copies - as all theses are official public documents and hence must be made available on request). The current solution that is used is a document that students fill out with their name, ID, date, etc. - they render this and then sign and upload the document. As there seems to be little reason to have anyone have to enter data that is already known, it would seem a better solution is to a group set in the Canvas course room for each student, then create a customized DOCX file in this group that includes the known data for this specific student. The student can move this file to their own user files, complete it, and submit it.

An example of a program to fill in DOCX files with control boxes (for the values) is JSON_to_DOCX_cover.py and it can be found at https://github.com/gqmaguirejr/E-learning (This program was to be able to create cover pages for theses using metadata automatically mined from the thesis itself and placed in a JSON file.)  This approach could be used to generate the preconfigured files.

I'm also thinking about this as a way of preconfiguring templates (either as DOCX files or as a ZIP file of a LaTeX project - all set for importing into Overleaf) such as for the thesis itself or for reports in many courses that I have where the students are given templates for documents (such as for a research methodology course where there are templates for the project proposed, research plan, and research report - as well as templates for peer reviews and a more formal written opposition report).

The submitted files can be viewed, commented on, graded, etc. using speed grader.

Does anyone see any flaws in this approach?

I know that it is not as powerful as the LTI solution and does not allow dynamic branching based upon the student's answer to each question, but it avoids the differentiated assignment grade book explosion and avoids the need to get an LTI application approved; it can be done by any teacher responsible for a Canvas course.

A related approach is to generate custom pages for each group (in the limit for each student) and imbed in this page a URL that the student can click on that goes to a web service. The URL would be unique for each page (i.e., group or student). This approach could be useful when the goal is simply personalized content and does not need to have the identity of the student in the request to the web service. This would be compatible with many survey services that generate a unique URL for each person being surveyed. This allows a completely anonymous survey if the web services does not know who was assigned each URL.

[maguire]

An example of how to modify the custom Doc Properties of a DOCX file is described in Modifying_DOCX_properties.docx or Modifying_DOCX_properties.pdf at https://github.com/gqmaguirejr/E-learning along with a program to extract these DocProperties and a program to insert modified values for the properties.

The bad news is that you have to get Word to update the fields and Cntrl-A F9 is insufficient, but printing (or faking printing) can be used to update the fields. Potentially if one was on a computer with a tool (such as Word) to process DOCX files one could script the printing and thus have a rather convenient method of customizing DOCX files to create personalized exams, assignments, forms, etc.

Given that a DOCX file is really a ZIP file, similar manipulation could be done on a ZIP file of a LaTeX project to customize an instance of the projector a student or group of students!

[maguire]

Actually, the DOCX updating problem could be solved by simply setting one of the fields to be dirty:

<w:fldChar w:fldCharType="begin" w:dirty="true"/>

This results in the user being prompted to update the fields when they open the document! So it is both feasible and easy!

[maguire]

Another method to send unique URLs to 10K students is to make one assignment in a Canvas course room where these students are present and then post the URL in a comment on this assignment. These comments are unique to each student. Note that a student does not have to have submitted something to the assignment to get a comment on this assignment. You can even attach a file to the comment. So you can distribute unique files to students.