[User Settings] Printable Roster with Photo Size Selectable

[smg36]

The printable roster is nice but the photos are much too small to be useful. The size of the photos, when available, should be selectable by instructors (e.g., small, medium, large). It would be nice if the rosters with photos could be sorted by groups too (see previous idea: Printable course roster ).

I can open the individual photos and they are much larger than they appear in the roster. For example, attached is the Canvas photo from the roster and attached is the Angel photo from the roster (we used to use Angel for classes). You can see the difference in usability.

[maguire]

In Canvas it is possible to store student specific information as "custom_data". This data is separated into namespaces. For example, I have looked at using it to store student's programs of study, such as:

@payload={ns: "se.kth.canvas-app.program_of_study",
                    data: {"programs": [{"code": "TCOMK", "name": "Information and Communication Technology", "start": 2016}]}}

You could create a namespace to store the official photos. By encrypting the photos before you store them as custom_data for a student, then you could limit the access to these images to a program that has the key.  You could add this program as an LTI tool and then invoke this tool from a navigation button. When the button is pushed, the external tool is invoked. This tool can check the identity of the caller and enforce the access control that you want (the tool can get information about the invoker from Canvas). The tool would them do something similar to the program I described in the earlier message. Then return a PDF of the student photo report.

My university has used such a tool to be able to provide (only) faculty with the ability to get a spreadsheet of grades exported from Canvas, but augmented by information from other SIS systems.

The advantage of the above is that it looks to the Canvas user as if it is all implemented in Canvas, but it has the flexibility of an external tool.

[h_carmichael]

Thanks for this  @maguire ‌, I'm going to pass this to our more technical person to look into!  @Maeve_McCooey ‌

[jlubkinchavez]

 @curtain ‌ I'm interested in your Photo Roster LTI tool. A saw the session linked above, but that looks like it for a diffreent (attendance) tool you developed. Is the photo roster code shareable? (I didn't see anything obviously it in your github) And I'm curious where you are on this journey 3 1/2 years later... Thanks!

[curtain]

Sorry for the very delayed reply.  The short answer is this is not really portable/sharable right now as it is querying k-state specific fields from LDAP and is relying on there specific infrastructure here.. It could, of course, be made more generic and configurable. Our team is going to take a look through the code and see if there is anything that would prevent us from sharing it via Github and then you could at least look at it on your side and see if the work required to fit it into your world would be worth it.  I will update here when I get the notes from my team.

As far as our journey, Photo roster is still a popular tool, along with our Scantron LTI service that works with current Quizzes and the lesser used Attendance tool referenced above,  We did recently move our LTI hosting from local servers to AWS so we are cloud hosting our own LTIs at this point.  i will update here when I know more.