Moving from using a spreadsheet to the Canvas gradebook

[maguire]

In one of the courses that I have been responsible for there is a final oral presentation with formal opponents who have previously written an opposition report. During the final oral presentation, I have found it very useful to have a spreadsheet with the presentations sorted into time order - and with columns ready to take notes on the presentation, on the oral oppositions, etc. Now that another teacher is going to take over the responsibility for this course I have been showing other teachers how to organize things to make it easier for them in this course. I realized when showing my spreadsheet to the new person that will take over the course that I have been stupid and should have made more of this directly in the gradebook. The result is that I made a program to add the desired custom columns to the gradebook for the teacher to write their notes during the presentation and to populate the columns with the material that is known (in this case the scheduled date and time for the presentation and the names of the opponent(s) for each student (these were peer reviewers of a draft of the report). I have separately added a column that contains the name of the project group that each student is in. The resulting program can be found at:

https://github.com/gqmaguirejr/Canvas-tools/blob/master/add-columns-for-II2202-final-presentation.py

Still to be done is to extract the title of the project from the draft report that was submitted by the project group and possibly a compressed version of the grading and feedback on the written opposition.

In any case, the program shows what can be done with the API to get the users in a course, the groups in a course, the members of each group, calendar events for the course, etc.