slack bot

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

Canvas could have a slack bot which can call some apis and communicate to the LTS right from groups. possible features:

- students could ask their latest results from a dm

- students could ask for a group's aggregated performance from a group

- teachers could handle attendance, grades, get notified, etc

- admins could have logs, basic settings, announcements

the list of possibilities is quite long and the possible use cases are great

14 Comments
Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

Hi mate.remias

I am fascinated by this idea.

I love how you are thinking outside of the box!  I am curious, do you think that expansion in the current Canvas notifications feature and growth in the instructor and admin reports section could accomplish many of the same use cases you listed above?  Just curious?

mate_remias
Community Novice
Author

Hi  @Renee_Carney ​

I believe partially they could help to get such features more comfortable use, still my suggestion specifically aims the integration with slack. The real power could be the embedded reporting for the self contained groups of people at the cost of a connector service.

scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Hello Máté,

Just to clarify, are you suggesting that Canvas building a notification system internally that would function similarly to Slack or are you suggesting that an integration between Slack and Canvas so that people could be notified via Slack when something happens in Canvas?

Thanks,

SD

mate_remias
Community Novice
Author

Hey Scott,

my suggestion is to build a slack integration like any of these (App Directory | Slack ​) which could act as a lightweight cli client towards canvas. My suggestion is not to keep this kind of integration one directional like having canvas notifications in slack, that could be cheap. What would turn it to awesome were the possibility to interact with canvas through slack, let it be slash commands or a chat bot.

tldr; I suggest an integration where a slack bot or slash command could communicate to canvas through the canvas API.

rm

scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Hello Again, Rémiás,

As someone who uses Slack everyday, this sounds like a potentially great partnership to me.  Usually though, we don't build integrations ourselves but rather provide support for companies that want to integrate with Canvas.  I'll make sure that our partnerships folks are aware of your suggestion.

Thank you for participating in the Canvas feature idea process.

Scott

owilder
Community Explorer

I want to vote!

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

This idea has been taken out of the Cold Storage and is opening for vote as part of the new Partner Integration ideas‌ space.  Find out more about this process in the New: Partner Integration Idea Process‌ blog post!

stephen
Community Novice

 @scottdennis ‌, i definitely appreciate the thoughts that you don't build integrations yourselves, but provide support to others to integrate, but I would consider that very often that happens most in an environment where you're the biggest kid in the sandbox. Slack's growth is beyond spectacular, (see: the-10-unique-ways-slack-hacked-growth-to-become-a-4-billion-company).

So perhaps this one is is the one that Instructure should look at and go.... yup, Slack integration is going to benefit us way more than it will cost us to build it.

scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure

Hey  @stephen ,

Thanks for checking back on this idea.  Personally, I couldn't function at work the way we do currently without Slack.  You probably saw Renee's comment to the effect that we now have a feature idea space specifically for partner integration ideas.  Maybe this one will take off and get noticed?  If we can get a spike in interest in this idea from other users I will happily alert our partnerships team and suggest they consider contacting the good folks at Slack.

tonyd
Community Novice

There is some update in previous thread. So as not to repeat: https://community.canvaslms.com/thread/5971#comment-80161