Awesome CanvasLMS

[robotcars]

This content is over 24-months old. While the resource is still valuable to the Community, it is important to evaluate the content to ensure that it is still relevant and reliable.

A curated list of CanvasLMS Community and Open Source contributions.

Inspired by GitHub - sindresorhus/awesome: Awesome lists about all kinds of interesting topics (awesome.re)

For more information see CanvasLMS Awesome List Contributions

changelog

Contents

• CanvasLMS
• Canvas Admin
• Canvas Instructor
• Instructional Design
• Canvas Mobile
• Canvas Theme Editor
• Canvas API
• Canvas Data
• Canvas GraphQL
• Canvas Live Events
• Open Source LTI
• Open Source LTI Development

CanvasLMS

• Source Code
  
  • instructure/canvas-lms The open LMS by Instructure, Inc.
  • Canvas LMS Github Repository Tutorial 
• Instructure UI
  • instructure/instructure-ui: A UI Component Library made by Instructure, Inc
  • instructure.design Instructure-UI ReactJS component library and examples
• Release Notes
  • Release Notes: Canvas LMS
  • Release Notes: Canvas Data 
• Source, Hosting, and Developer Support
  • Canvas Dev & Friends - Instructure Tech Blog Resources for API development, App development, and open source development

Canvas Guides
The complete list of guides for all users and roles, from Student to Parent, and everyo...

Canvas Admin

• Guides
  • Getting Started Tutorials - Table of Contents
  • FastTrack: Canvas Admin Series
• Adoption & Engagement
  • Canvas Admin Checklist A comprehensive list of recommendations from CSM's and Trainers by Training Services‌
  • Your Checklist for Canvas Success a checklist for adoption, utilization, and improving the overall student experience by @akuntz 
  • Preparing Your Canvas: Starting a new LMS thoughtful and detailed journey of Canvas adaption at NKU by  @jonesn16 
• Managing Security
  • Administrative guidelines for managing Inherited Developer Keys 
  • Administrative guidelines for issuing Canvas Developer Keys 
• Courses
  • Growing with Canvas - New Training Course
  • Passport to Canvas - Student Canvas Orientation Course 
• Powering Up & More!
  
  • Powering Up Your Canvas Course: Canvas Beginner Essentials an awesome series of infographics by j1201982‌
  • Powering Up Your Canvas Course: Canvas Intermediate Essentials
  • Powering Up Your Canvas Course: Triumvirate Tips! (Intermediate Series) 
  • Powering Up Your Canvas Course: Advanced Essentials 
  • Powering Up Your Canvas Course: Cool Things Series
  • Getting Started with Canvas in 10 Steps (Faculty) an awesome set of customizable infographic checklists by  @kpinto 
  • Getting Started with Canvas in 10 Steps (Students) 

Canvas Instructor

• Guides
  • Canvas Instructor Guide - Table of Contents
• Discussions
• Canvas Features
  • Functionality Comparison: Current vs. New Canvas Gradebook 
• Tools
  • Canvancements - Canvas Enhancements  

Instructional Design

• Accessibility 
  • General Accessibility Design Guidelines  
  • Accessibility within Canvas list of officially supported screen readers for CanvasLMS
  • An Intro To Screen Reader Testing for Sighted Developers This quick guide will give you an introduction to the why and how of testing your website's user experience using screen readers.
  • How to Fix and Prevent Accessibility Issues in Your Canvas Course tips for addressing accessibility issues in a Canvas course by  @dholton ‌
  • Inclusive Design Principles intended to give anyone involved in the design and development of websites and applications - designers, user experience professionals, developers, product owners, idea makers, innovators, artists and thinkers - a broad approach to inclusive design.
  • Inclusive Components A blog trying to be a pattern library. All about designing inclusive web interfaces, piece by piece.
• Accessibility LTI
  • ALLY a discussion about adoption of Blackboard ALLY and comparison/combination with UDOIT
  • UDOIT Information The Universal Design Online content Inspection Tool, or UDOIT (pronounced, “You Do It”) enables faculty to identify accessibility issues in their Canvas course content
• Course Checklists
  • Course Evaluation Checklist byTraining Services‌
• Rich Content Editor - Guides, Tutorials & Courses
  • New and Improved Rich Content Editor HTML Cheatsheet 
  • CanvasHacks Classroom open course sharing different ways of designing content in Canvas
  • Flexbox Grid tips and guides how to use Flexbox Grid inside Canvas RCE by @MattHanes 
  • Relearn CSS layout: Every Layout great resource for wrestling with CSS layout
• Homepage and Content
  • Creating an inviting course home page
  • Home Sweet Homepages without Tables
• Mastery Paths
  • Hacking Mastery Paths
  • Taking the Mystery out of Mastery Paths
• Mobile
• Rubrics

Canvas Mobile

• Android and iOS Mobile App API Documentation
• Canvas Mobile App URL Schemes (Useful with Canvas Data)
• This video is currently being processed. Please try again in a few minutes.
   
• Mobile App Design | Course Evaluation Checklist
• Canvas Student App Feature List
• Canvas Teacher App Feature List
• Canvas Mobile Users Group (CMUG)
• Canvas Mobile Product Manager Updates

Canvas Theme Editor

• Documentation
  • How do I upload custom JavaScript and CSS files to an account? 
• Global UI Hacks & Augmentation
  
  • Admin Tray - Sub Account Menu 
  • Create a Sandbox Course via Web Application/API? 
  • Course import tool: include completed courses by default
  • Custom Sorting Terms in the Canvas UI 
  • Custom JavaScript for Admin/Courses Page 
  • Customizing Add People Dialog with Custom JavaScript
  • Global Nav Menu - Custom Tray 
  • Module Filters 
  • Sort Account-Level Course Page Terms in Descending Order 
• User Script UI Hacks & Augmentation
  
  • Admin Tray - Sub Account Menu 
  • Canvancements Comprehensive list of Canvancements (Canvas Enhancements)  @James  has developed for Canvas
  • HTML Editor Syntax Highlighter
• Discussions, Mutation Observers
  • A comment on handling CORS and vanilla JS authentication #comment-132522  
  • How to adapt to the undocumented JavaScript loading sequence changes?
  • Inclusive Components A blog trying to be a pattern library. All about designing inclusive web interfaces, piece by piece.

Canvas API

• Documentation
  • Canvas LMS REST API Documentation
  • How do I manage API access tokens as an admin? 
• Managing Security
  • Administrative guidelines for managing Inherited Developer Keys 
  • Administrative guidelines for issuing Canvas Developer Keys 
•  Tutorials and Courses
  
  • Canvas APIs: Getting started, the practical ins and outs, gotchas, tips, and tricks 
  • API Testing: Postman 
  • Developer Tools for the Canvas User
  • Ruby & The Canvas API - Self Paced free course on Canvas.net
• Discussion
  • Handling Pagination
  • Playing nice when calling APIs concurrently 
  • Easy integration with the Canvas API | InstructureCon 2011 - YouTube
• Programming Languages, Examples, Support
  • curl and OAuth tokens on macOS command line tricks by @matthew_buckett ‌
  • API - Getting Started for the Absolute Beginner #comment-150077 command line tricks by  @phanley ‌
  • A Simple Python GET Script
  • Python code samples 
  • How do we *USE* API? #comment-139370 some Python and Ruby examples
  • API request to get a full list of students example in jQuery and Python
  • .NET - Canvas API Implementation 
  • Update Student Notification Preferences with Python or Ruby Notification Preferences API 
  • Get a List of Students and Missing Work in Python by  @bbennett2
  • Postman Canvas API Collection by @dsweeney2 
• Live API
  • Canvas Live API Basic interface for using and testing API requests, change the subdomain for your institution.
  •  @fosterl ‌ demystifies the API in her InstCon16 presentation
• Utilities, Wrappers, Examples
  • universityofadelaide/rest-client-wrapper Ruby REST client wrapper around the rest-client gem
  • ucfopen/canvasapi Python API wrapper for Instructure's Canvas LMS. Easily manage courses, users, gradebooks, and more
  • dgrobani/py3-canvaslms-api Python 3 API wrapper for Instructure's Canvas LMS with real-world examples of use
  • byuitechops/canvas-api-wrapper NodeJS, Simplifies the already simple canvas api calls, and handles pagination
  • ubccapico/node-canvas-api Access the Canvas API using Node.js
    
  • kstateome/canvas-api Java library for interacting with the Canvas LMS API
  • unsupported/canvas unsupported Canvas tweaks and scripts, the API and SIS examples are useful

Canvas Data

• Documentation
  
  • Canvas Platform Services : Canvas Data
    • Canvas Data FAQ 
    • Canvas Data Portal  schema and API docs
• Canvas Data API
  • Canvas Data API Authentication  
  • How to Make an API Call with Canvas Data Examples in 8 languages
• Download, Import, Manage
  
  • Build a Canvas Data Warehouse on AWS in 30 minutes! low cost solution with AWS CloudFormation Stack shared by 50581462‌
  • Managing Canvas Data with Embulk YAML configs for importing Canvas Data with Embulk, for any RDBMS and more
    
  • Canvas Data: CLI Instructure's command line tool to connect and download files from Canvas Data
  • Canvas Data SDK Python SDK and command-line tool for working with the Canvas Data API and generating DDLs
  • Canvas Data Viewer download Canvas Data files into a SQL Server database where you can query and analyze the information
  • Canvancements/Canvas Data A PHP library for Canvas Data API and MySQL import tool
  • millerjm/canvasdata Process for importing the Canvas Data Files into a MySQL Database
•  Queries
  • Deobfuscate user_dim.id? Quick example of user_id association
  • instructure/canvas-hosted-data-examples Collection of examples that use Canvas Hosted Data to answer questions
  • Canvas Data queries for AWS/Athena - a git repo of queries written for Athena by @reynlds 
  • Basic Enrollment Report #comment-141921 Example enrollment query
    
  • Canvas Data Page Views #comment-101576
  • Getting the title of the page that students viewed #comment-109279 
  • Finding your Community Users
  • List View Dashboard Usage Discovery #comment-121975 Requests table queries for evaluating dashboard view preferences
  • Masquerade Reports #comment-141627 Request table queries for Masquerading
  • Find external tool usage in course shells
  • Redshift vs. Canvas Analytics 
  • Submission Date/Time for External Content?
  • Power BI discussion, with some queries and sharing, including average time to grade
• Tableau
  • How to Open Canvas Data Files in Tableau
  • Tableau Workbook Examples  
  • Announcement Posted?  
  • Assignment Grade History
  • Canvas Data: Assignments Workbook 
  • Assignment Score & Final Course Grade Distributions 
  • Device Usage in Canvas Data with Tableau 
  • Early Warning for Students 
  • Quiz Availability Dates 
  • Searching for Words, Tools, Text Strings
  • Which teacher hasn’t logged into Canvas?
• Theory, Concepts, Discussions
  • Canvas Data Requests count vs. Canvas Analytics Page Views
  • How Do I Determine Time Spent on Site
  • The Problem with the Requests Table
  • Can we have access to students' time spent on the course site?
  • Requests Table an in depth discussion about the complexities and issues with the table in SQL
  • Compelling uses for the Requests table?
    

Canvas GraphQL

• Documentation
  • GraphQL API - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation 
  • Introduction to GraphQL | GraphQL Learn about GraphQL, how it works, and how to use it in this series of articles
• GraphiQL
  • your.instructure.com/graphiql, note the i, browser based GraphQL query explorer
    
• Queries
  • Experimental GraphQL API?
  • Not authorized to view the specified document 17210
  • Using GraphQL to View All Module Items
• Mutations
  • How to read and change Course Post Policy of the New Gradebook with GraphQL

Canvas Live Events

• Documentation & Setup
  • How do I use the Data Services Portal? 
    • How do I subscribe to Live Events using Canvas Data Services?
    • How do I create an SQS queue in Amazon Web Services to receive Live Events data from Canvas? 
• IMS Standards & Documentation
  • Caliper Analytics | IMS Global Learning Consortium 
  • IMS Caliper Specification v1.1 
  • Caliper v1.1 Guide - Table of Contents 
• Ingestion
  
  • LEDbelly - Live Events Daemon for Canvas LMS - SQS to SQL, supports Canvas and Caliper for multiple RDBMS
  • Exporting Live Events to SQL database with Fluentd by @jerry_nguyen
    
    
    Bug bounty of 2,500 community badge points for the following blog posts and documentation:
    
    An AWS guide or CloudFormation Stack for Live Events consumption as described by:
     @lfeng1 ‌ here Getting SQS message to SQL Database #comment-130997 
    msharke1‌ https://community.canvaslms.com/people/msharke1@asu.edu/status/31405" modifiedtitle="true" title="He...
    as 50581462‌ has done for Canvas Data with Build a Canvas Data Warehouse on AWS in 30 minutes! 
    
• Queries
• Theory, Concepts, Discussions
  • Getting SQS message to SQL Database 
  • Combining canvas data and live events to have timely data  @millerjm ‌'s InstCon19 presentation on Last Day of Attendance, with queries
  • Big Data Ideas & Usage for Tiny Budgets & Small Teams carroll-ccsd‌'s InstCon19 presentation on Canvas Data, Live Events, Real Time data LTI
  • Live Events: Suffering with IDs discussion about differences in event formats and use cases.

Open Source LTI

• CUOnline/sandbox Ruby LTI tool that generates sandbox courses in Canvas
• CUOnline/SandboxCore An ASP.NET Core implementation of the Sandbox Course functionality.
• CIDI/kennethware-2.0 Tools to facilitate rapid course development in Instructure Canvas.
• ets-berkeley-edu/suitec SuiteC is a set of LTI-compliant tools optimized to work with the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS).
• ucfopen/UDOIT The Universal Design Online content Inspection Tool, or UDOIT (pronounced, “You Do It”) enables faculty to identify accessibility issues in Canvas by Instructure. It will scan a course, generate a report, and provide resources on how to address common accessibility issues
• Materia Engage students by embedding interactive apps into your Canvas modules or assignments. Materia comes with a library of games, surveys, and simulations; each is easily customized by faculty to fit their course. Developing new apps for Materia is easy and streamlined.

Open Source LTI Development

• Documentation
  • Learning Tools Interoperability | IMS Global Learning Consortium  
  • Basic Overview of How LTI works | IMS Global Learning Consortium 
  • LTI Fundamentals FAQ | IMS Global Learning Consortium 
  • Video: Get To Know LTI Advantage introduces LTI Advantage in less than 10 mins by @lfeng1 ‌
• Guides, Videos, Dicussions, and Courses
  
  • Great API and LTI dev course, but not maintained for a while in which  @sendres ‌ initiates a new open course for LTI collaboration and development
  • Video: LTI 1.3 in Action short video covering the messages passed between Platform and Tool using LTI 1.3 and Open ID Connect by @lfeng1 ‌
  • .NET - OAuth2 Workflow: Part 1 - Authrorize Redirect 
  • LTI User/enrollment provisioning and synchronization 
• Examples & Templates
  • Hire an LTI Consultant/Freelancer? #comment-107883 in which pklove‌ replies with a basic NodeJS LTI right in his post
  • UCFOpen LTI Template Flask LTI template written in Python using the Flask framework. Quickly create a new application that can be launched through your Learning Management System using the LTI protocol. Uses standard configurable Key & Secret to launch
  • instructure/lti_example an example of using LTI and the Outcomes Service in Instructure Canvas
• Discussion
  •  

[robotcars]

I spoke with Stefanie about this awhile back when I first put this on my todo list. Since the list doesn't require 'code', and can go beyond code. I've included some items which are just discussions, theory, documentation, and courses. The reason for choosing Meta Community, was that anyone in the community (Meta Community Group) can edit the doc, while others (eg. Instructional Designers, Admins), might not be in the Developer Group.

This is not my document, I am not the maintainer. More on that here https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-17356 

[scottdennis]

OK, that makes sense to me.  Thanks!

[b_w_reid]

Hi, A lot of the links in the Canvas Admin section don't work! 🙂

[Bobby2]

HI @b_w_reid I suspect they may be victims of moving to a new community platform. Hopefully they will be restored soon.

[Jeff_F]

@robotcars  I am extremely humbled that a set of my contributions made it to your list. When Canvas Data 2 comes out I'll be sure to contribute entries using that schema.

@scottdennis  - as the following resources may still be of value to someone, do you supposed the blog entries below can be brought over from the prior community? The links below are from the Tableau section above.  I entered *** next to the two that are more complex where the detailed explanation is useful.  These have a high potential of helping others.  

• Announcement Posted?  
• Assignment Grade History
• Canvas Data: Assignments Workbook 
• Assignment Score & Final Course Grade Distributions 
• Early Warning for Students  ***
• Quiz Availability Dates 
• Searching for Words, Tools, Text Strings ***
• Which teacher hasn’t logged into Canvas?

The Early Warning Report - 

[scottdennis]

Hi Jeff,

Unfortunately we still had access to the old site from August 7th when we flipped the switch until Jan 1st but then our platform provider took down the old Jive site and we no longer have a way to go back in and grab content.   Hopefully Robert and folks like him who still have useful content like this will be willing and able to share again.

[robotcars]

@Jeff_F I'm extremely grateful for your contributions. I'd never used Tableau before tinkering with Canvas Data, your posts were enormously helpful in getting started.

When CanvasData2 is out, maybe we can run a points challenge to get people to recontribute key concepts with the new schema.

This entire document needs to be updated and curated for what survived the migration or had the URL that changed. 

@scottdennis I can't see permissions in the Edit option as with Jive. Is this document still editable to anyone in the MetaCommunity group? Anyone should be able to edit this.

[scottdennis]

Hey @robotcars 

Just to be sure I understand correctly, you would like for anyone who joins the Community Users Group (we changed it from Meta because that named confused some people as to the group's purpose) so be able to edit this resource, correct?

[robotcars]

Hi @scottdennis,

Anyone in the community really, unless you have concerns. In Jive the only option was to allow members of this group to edit this thread. However that can be done in Khoros works for me. The document should be edited and curated by the community as it creates and finds resources/answers/solutions that need a lasting bookmark and a place for discovering those contributions.

[scottdennis]

Looking at options now...

[rbungo]

We are a new Canvas client and this looks like a wonderful resource that was painstakingly put together by many superstar users/admins.  It is a terrible terrible shame that the links are all broken.  From what I'm reading above it appears to be due to Canvas moving the community platform.  How awful they did not bring this valuable content over.

[cgaudreau]

Anyone actively using Materia? I'm extremely excited about implementing it, but our ITS department was having a tough time working through the existing documentation.

@rseilham - Do you know of anyone on the team at UCF who might be able to support wide adoption, or a contact I can put my IT team in touch with?

[iturgeon]

@cgaudreau senior developer here overseeing the Materia team at UCF - We've helped other schools get up and running with Materia, we'll do what we can to help you get started.  We'd like to hear more about what trouble they're having so we can improve that process too.

You can reach out to me, ian at ucf dot edu, add a question on the github repo (https://github.com/ucfopen/Materia/discussions/categories/q-a), or join our Slack team (link in readme https://github.com/ucfopen/Materia) 

[cgaudreau]

Thank you, @iturgeon. I'll reach out via email shortly. Appreciate it!

[erik_gustafson]

I cannot access any of these links above. It gives me an error message that the page could not be found. 

Could someone fix that for us? 

[dgrobani]

This list was called out in the March 2021 Account Services Newsletter from Instructure CSMs. Excellent publicity for a marvelous resource!

[robotcars]

I think most of these articles are migrated, the links just changed. I have been planning to go through and search each article/topic and relink, but it's a chore. 

Edit:

@scottdennis I tried to update about 12 links just now and got this error: Message cannot exceed 30,000 characters.

Can this be adjusted with Khoros, or do i need to split this into individual articles by topic?

[scottdennis]

I'm not sure, @robotcars but I will ask.

[robotcars]

Thanks @scottdennis It's currently just over 50,000 characters, but I can't edit.

[scottdennis]

Hi Robert,

How about now?  We increased the limit so you should now be able to edit.

[robotcars]

Scott,

Got the same 30,000 limit after updating all the links in the Admin section.

[scottdennis]

Oh, no!  We set the limit for that group but now I am wondering if we need to do something additional for existing content?  I will ask.

[robotcars]

Hi @scottdennis, Still can't edit this because it exceeds 30,000 characters.