Convert HTML File to Canvas Pages Authoring Tool

kmobbs
Community Novice

Hi all-

 

May I introduce myself to the group? I am an ID a Jacksonville State University in Alabama. We are now in the planning stages of our transition to Canvas! Here is my first query for the group.

I agree with the many ideas in Canvas vs Files that pages are a preferable way to build the bulk of content in a Canvas course. Also, as demonstrated in Converting HTML Content to Pages to convert existing HTML files to Canvas Pages is a tedious task. Currently, we have many courses which are designed and built using a website type structure and then moved to a LMS. For our transition of current courses, but for other reasons too, I would like to continue to develop content off line and, in a bulk fashion, upload these HTML files to Canvas to be viewed as Pages (not as files).

When an imscc file is imported into Canvas, the XML controls whether content is built as a Page (wiki page), a file, etc. As an experiment, I manually modified the XML of an imscc file to create a package which uploaded my files properly. Of course, this is more tedious than re-building the content using Canvas Pages. So, here’s my drawn-out question/need:

Anyone know of, have advice about, or be interested in helping develop a User Interface which could take a bulk set of HTML files, compose proper XML for those files to be imported as pages, and then package it all up as an imscc file? This UI would simply be automating the manual process I did in my test case. The UI would need to be able to do the following steps (bulk style):

  1. enter proper code and file references into the header of each HTML file
  2. place the files into a folder called wiki_content
  3. update an imsmanifest file with proper file references to the HTML files

 

Effectively, this would be a course authoring tool which is very limited in scope. I have searched and tried many course authoring tools (eXe, Xerte, Articulate, etc., etc.). None of these, so far, have all the pieces necessary to accomplish what I want. If you know of an existing CA tool that could do this, I would be interested in hearing about that as well.

 

Thanks so much.

Kevin

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