Course Analysis Tool

[CommunityTeam]

To join the conversation or see additional resources visit: Course Analysis Tool

Champlain College developed a Course Analysis Tool to be used in our QA process for online courses. The tool is built entirely on top of Google Spreadsheets and pulls data directly from Canvas via the API. We will present the features of the tool and share it with participants.

Presenter: Josh Blumberg - Champlain College

[jamely]

This is a great tool that you all are sharing, with great documentation! I look forward to using it once I have my course fully designed to double check everything. Thanks!

[jbrady2]

This looks like a great tool. One of the things a few of our faculty have said that they missed when our college switched from Blackboard to Canvas was the link checker tool. I am going to spend some time testing this and see if it would be a viable option for those faculty members who would like to have such a resource.

[awilliams]

 @jbrady2  , check out How do I validate links in a course? Canvas has added this functionality recently as part of the Tis the Season in Community: Act 2. 

[jbrady2]

awilliams​ Thanks for this. I do not know how many times I have been in Canvas this week and within Settings, with the spring semester beginning on Monday, and yet, I did not even notice that button.

[ldix]

Has anyone used this to do a read only inventory for all links in the course?

If so, can you share - please....

[Jeff_F]

 @ldix ‌ to do this one could list the body/ description of all assignments, quizzes, pages, discussion prompts.  This could be done via Canvas Data or I believe also the API.  For example, under Assignments API there is description field.   Assignments - Canvas LMS REST API Documentation  Perhaps run the API to GET the Assignment title and description.  Once the HTML code is listed out in Excel format then it is possible to copy/ paste that text to a URL extractor such as :   Extract URLs    (We started to write a macro for this however found it easier to use an existing resource).  Then export the file and sort/ remove duplicates in Excel.  Voila!  A list is created.  

I speculate there are more creative ways to do this however the above is this end user's solution.     ;o)   

[ldix]

Thank you so much for that information.

I will give it a try!

[jblumberg · Accepted solution]

We just updated the Course Analysis Tool to match changes in the Canvas API over the last few years.  It's functionality remains largely the same, but it more gracefully handles some new features in Canvas.

Course Analysis Tool 1.1 - Open Source Release - Updated 2/2023

[AndreaCohn]

Oh thank you so much for updating this!!! I was looking for something like this, and, boom! Here it is. 

[emily_bailey]

Would this tool be of use to run checks for an entire college's MSTR versions of courses to check for all broken links (including those that go to external sites within learning objects, etc.)within all of the courses instead of just a course that an individual instructor is teaching? 

[lherdan]

This is a great tool.