Fun with Canvas in a VM and using custom data to keep track of a student's program of study

[maguire]

In conjunction with experiments concerning using an LTI interface to realize a dynamic quiz, I built a version of Canvas that could run in a Virtual Machine (specifically an image that could be run by VirtualBox).

Advantages of this approach include:

• easy to try things without any risk to the real Canvas infrastructures
• easy to give an OVA image of the VM to students

The image was built using an ubuntu version of linux by following the Quick Start instructions at https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/wiki/Quick-Start.

Details of the operation of the different containers that comprise this system will be described in a forthcoming Bachelor's thesis.

I should note that when I do the docker-compose to bring up the Canvas instance, it takes a very long time.

In order to do some experiments with the dynamic quiz, I created some fake users and enrolled them in a course. Additionally, since one of the things that I would like the dynamic quiz to exploit is knowledge of what program of study these users are in I augments the user's custom data with details of what program they are in.

The initial version of the program (create-fake-users-in-course.py) can be found at  https://github.com/gqmaguirejr/Canvas-tools .

The result is a course with a set of fake users as can be seen in the list of user's in this course:

An example of fake program data is:

custom data for user Ann FakeStudent is {'data': {'programs': [{'code': 'CINTE', 'name': 'Degree Programme in Information and Communication Technology', 'start': 2016}]}}

Some further details about the above can be found at Creating fake users and enrolling them into a course: Chip sandbox