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@jabetrue  I don't use PostMan, so I cannot help with the CSV portion, but you will also need the source course ID and potentially the destination module ID and destination assignment group ID. One trick I use a lot when I cannot figure out something from the documentation is to look at what Canvas does and then recreate that request. I'll describe how to do this within Chrome. Go the page where you want to initiate the assignment copy (either the assignments page or the assignment itself). Press F`12 to open the Developer Tools and then switch to the Network tab. Normally you're safe to select Fetch/XHR and it cuts down on the number of requests, but you can also clear the requests lists right before you make the new request. Now click on the more options (three vertical dots) button and choose Copy To. Type in the name of the first destination course and then select it after Canvas finds it. Fill in the module information and where to place it if appropriate. At this point, I may clear the requests before hitting the Copy button. This clears out any extraneous information so I can focus on what is important. It's the circle with the slash through it at the top next to the red circle for record. Now I hit Copy. Look for the new request that was made. In this case, it is content_migrations. Select it from the Name column. Now click on Headers on the right side. The Request URL will tell you what URL to use and the Request Method will tell you whether it is a GET or POST. We already knew this one would be a POST since we were creating new content. The Request URL is instance/api/courses/:course_id/content_migrations. The :course_id, is the destination course ID, not the source course ID. Sometimes knowing the URL is enough to find the documentation and figure things out. That particular URL is for the Create a content migration endpoint, but the options may not be clear. Now click on Payload. We have a JSON object that shows what Canvas sends. The documentation can help you understand what it is doing and possible lead you to a more intelligent copy.   { "migration_type": "course_copy_importer", "select": { "assignments": [ "39452860" ] }, "settings": { "source_course_id": "3646256", "insert_into_module_id": "834172", "insert_into_module_type": "assignments", "insert_into_module_position": null } }   For me, the assignment number that I am copying is is 39452860. This would be your assignment_id parameter. Under the settings, the source_course_id is the ID for the course that you are copying from. That's why I said you would need to add the source course ID to your CSV file. The module information is optional if you just want to copy the assignment to the course and then later go through and clean it up. This is fairly well defined in the API documentation. insert_into_module_id is the ID of the destination module. insert_into_module_type is not necessary according to the documentation. It allows you to copy just assignments, discussions, files, content pages, or quizzes. Since you are selecting an individual assignment to copy, you wouldn't need to filter the type. insert_into_module_position is an index (starting with 1) of where to place it into the module. This may be tricky if not first (1) or last (null). If it varies by destination course, then the position may need to be another parameter that you need. What you don't get from the request Canvas made is that there are other options you may want to use. By default, Canvas dumps everything into the "Imported Assignments" assignment category. I use descriptive assignment group names and "Imported Assignments" is not one of them. There is a move_to_assignment_group_id setting that controls where the assignment ends up. If you want to place it into a specific assignment group, then this is another parameter that you would have to include in your CSV file. If you already had a Final Exam in your destination course that was created by copying the original course, then you may not need to do any clean-up. Canvas will override the existing assignment rather than creating a duplicate. If there was no Final Exam in the destination course or if it was created manually and not copied from the same source, then you will probably end up with some clean-up tasks. Here are some parting thoughts. I teach math at a small institution where each faculty develops their own content. For people like me, copying assignments from one course to another is rare. About the only time I use it is when I need to grab an assignment from years ago to reuse it in the current term. It's quicker for me to use the web interface than try to automate it -- even though I'm a person who hates repetitive clicks. Some institutions have enough courses that they would want to automate this (or use blueprint courses). Those institutions are are going to want to do something other than use a REST client. REST clients are great for testing, but there is a lot of looking up of items to populate your CSV file. If this is a major or recurring process and you have so many of those that you have want to automate it, then you will also want to write a program that does all the looking up of the information so you don't have to manually create the CSV. If you're writing a program to look up the information, you might as well use that program to initiate the requests and handle the clean-up work rather than trying to use a REST client. ... View more

@d00084815  Are you using a school Gmail account? If your institution has taken over the domain at Google (ours has), they can impose limitations on what can be done by their users in the name of security. Some people have reported that the scripts work with they use a personal Gmail address but not when they use their school account. ... View more

@d00084815  I doubt that it's something that changed on Canvas' end. There have been enough people report this that there is likely a bug in my script that doesn't check something. Almost always this has been related to not making it through the configure API settings part successfully. In fact, I can duplicate the error you're getting if I don't successfully authenticate. Here are the suggestions that seem to work (either that or people give up after trying). Go back to Canvas > Configure API Settings. Make sure that it shows your hostname and a bunch of discs (solid circles) for the Access Token. There is a way to check this. If you go back to configure API settings, it should show your hostname. If so, click Submit (no need to change anything) and you should get a Success! message. If not, then you didn't successfully authenticate and that is where people normally run into issues. When configuring the API, put in the whole hostname. I designed it to work with institution when your full instance is institution.instructure.com, and that works for me right now, but there are other times that it works better with the whole thing rather than just the shortcut. You should also be able to copy/paste the URL from your dashboard. Make sure it comes back with a confirmation notice that you have authenticated correctly. If that message doesn't appear, then it didn't take. The message says "Success! Connected to Canvas instance as your name, You may now use the API calls." If you get a Failure! notice, then there is a problem with the instance/token. Nothing will work Make sure the API token you're using has admin rights (this is rarely the issue). If you are reusing a token that you have saved, go to Account > Settings and make sure that the token is still valid and hasn't expired. ... View more

@MichaelCrowl  I don't use Python or the Canvas library, but I have done a lot of the Canvas API and quizzes (although not this particular API). Here are some comments based on my experience. You definitely want to use the real Canvas IDs. The 1, 2, 3, are just examples in the documentation, not a literal 1st question, 2nd question, 3rd question, etc. You are correct that many of the POST and PUT API endpoints have an parent object in them that does not appear in the GET. You need the quiz_submissions wrapper when using the PUT or POST versions. That explains why the LIVE API rejected it. The Python library you're using may add that for you (I don't use it, so I'm not sure). When I write my code for this stuff, I do a check. If the object I'm sending is missing the parent object, then I add it for the user (which is just me). I cannot speak for the library you're using. It would seem that since I'm using a named parameter, that I would take care of that for the user, but it may just be easier to used named parameters in Python. I've found that I need to put a [] in the parameter name if your JSON.stringify or library doesn't automatically do it. That is, "quiz_submissions" doesn't work for me, but "quiz_submissions[]" does. That's an open and close bracket at the end to indicate it's an array. You would think that since quiz_submissions is an array that the conversion would add that, but it really depends on the library you're using. Since I'm not familiar with the Python or the library, the calling of the function using quiz_submissions=[mydict] would be a place I would explore. I would make it so that quiz_submissions was the value I was passing, which would mean that it wouldn't need an extra quiz_submissions on the inside. What I would pass would be quiz_submissions[], but I don't know if that can be done in Python. Again, don't take any Python suggestions from me too literally, but I would make sure that there is a quiz_submissions[] parameter in what is sent to Canvas. The IDE you're using shouldn't matter. JSON uses double quotes, but that code that converts it to JSON would take care of that. I'm assuming that your Python library tells Canvas that content type is application/json for you. What I do when I reach a point like this (possibly before this) is to print the JSON code that I'm sending to Canvas. I would compare it visually and make sure those brackets are in there. Then I would go to a REST client (Postman seems popular, I still use a different one) and send it and see if it works. There is nothing special about this request. In other words, it appears to be an object that you are sending to a routine that makes a PUT request. Does your library support a generic PUT statement rather than the sub.update_score_and_comments() function? If the library has any debugging options, you might turn that on and see what is being sent to Canvas. ... View more

@Ron_Bowman  People still use that script? I haven't looked at it in a long time, but it is possible that Canvas has changed their structure and I'm putting the drag on the wrong element. The script itself is pretty short, so that's about all I can think of that might be causing the problem. It is unlikely that they upgraded jQuery UI. I just looked on my end and don't see where anything has changed in the underlying structure. It worked for me in simple usage. I'm still waiting for Canvas to remove the jQuery UI like they said they would 6 years ago. That will break it completely when that happens. I experienced some wonkiness, not what you're describing, after clicking the +Criterion button. But it may have been more a case of if you Cancel and then Edit again, the script doesn't run at all (you would need to reload the page). I also noticed that I could drag a criterion beneath the footer that allows you to add a criterion. I'm going to pretend I'm the Canvas documentation. It does what it says, but if you use it in a non-documented way, the behavior is undefined. ... View more

@ShanePerrien  Four things jump out, but I'm not sure that any of them are the culprit. The fourth one has a higher probability of being the issue than the first three. You are not encoding your query string -- or at least not when you're logging it. That may not be the issue, though. I just tested the API call (not using Powershell) and it worked. I did have to convert my \r\n to %0D%0A to get it to recognize it. If my URL contained a question mark, it was okay, but if there was an ampersand, then it would have to be encoded, otherwise anything after it gets stripped. Your example NSSE code looks like it should be fine. The second thing that jumps out is to make sure that you are using your school's Canvas hostname. You put yourschool.test.instructure.com. At first, I just figured you were doing that to hide your school's domain, but then you just posted an access token in a public forum, so I'm not sure. If that is a long term token, it should be immediately deleted. I still don't think this is it, the message that I sent successfully in the first part failed with a 404 error (not found) rather than a 400 (bad request) when I tried using it. The third thing is to make sure that person the token belongs to has a relationship with the person you're sending it to. My token is to an admin account and can see everyone. But if I was a non-admin teacher trying to send to a student, it wouldn't work. I would probably get a 401 code (unauthorized) rather than 400 if this happened. I did test sending with a bogus token and got the 401 error. The fourth thing I would check is to make sure there is not an embedded newline in what you are sending. I don't know if it's the way you pasted into the Community or the way it is in your code, but you have a line break after the ? before the recipients parameter. I would make sure that everything within a double quotes is on a single line, using a + to concatenate multiple strings together if necessary. Of all the things I've seen and considered, this is the most likely to generate a 400 (bad request) code instead of a different message. Here's what I would do. Make sure there are not multiple lines within double quotes and try it again. If that doesn't work, then try this: Send yourself (rather than someone else) a very simple message. Don't make it part of a CSV import, just a very short script to test the sending. Don't put in any newlines don't put in the link. I used something like this (but with my real Canvas ID). Not shown, but you do need the authorization header in there. POST <instance>/api/v1/conversations?recipients[]=12345&subject=test&body=test+message If that works, then start making it more complex. Add in the new lines and test again. If that works, then add in the link. If it breaks somewhere along the way, then we know where to look. ... View more

@ShanePerrien  I don't use PowerShell or NSSE, but let me take a stab at it anyway. Does your CSV file have the Canvas ID or the SIS ID? It needs to be the Canvas ID or you need to preface it with sis_user_id: to tell it that it is a SIS ID. The SIS IDs page in the API documentation explains more. The 400 status code means it is a bad request that could not be understood. It could be due to sending a non-numeric user ID. The Canvas IDs are numeric and if your user IDs in the CSV file have are not, it could be the problem. The post on the NSSE site mentioned that the NSSE file had to be converted to Canvas User IDs. If you miss that step, it certainly falls in line with question I asked. If the NSSE student_id is not your SIS ID, then you would have to do some further conversion to get either the Canvas ID or the SIS ID for the user. I cannot speak to the PowerShell aspect other than the approach used of putting all the material into the query string is not typically used for a POST. The Microsoft documentation for the Invoke-RestMethod shows more structured ways. My initial guess is the user ID issue, though. If it turns out that isn't the issue, then you might look into debugging and looking at what is actually sent to the Canvas server. The query string should be URI encoded. I don't know if PowerShell does that automatically. If it doesn't, then it might work for the person that wrote it because they have no special characters in their user names. If the survey URL contained a query string and it wasn't encoded properly, then Canvas might see that as part of the its URL and misinterpret it. My guess is that is not the issue, just trying to think of other ways that it could go wrong. ... View more

@Ron_Bowman  Those were individual screenshots, not videos. They were made in the process of creating a new rubric on an assignment rather than using the Rubrics page or editing an existing rubric, so it might be different then. For your "I do not get that I have a 5 in the max rating box and a -5 in the Pts box before hitting update", that was after I put -5 in the criterion pts box and clicked outside that box (or perhaps I hit enter). I did not go straight from the -5 to the Create/Update Rubric button. The main point is that what it shows on the screen is not the way the rubric was saved and the page reload fixes everything. I did modify the post to be clearer. It not says to put a negative point value for the "criterion points (not the rating points)". I clarified step 2 to say that it switches "the position of" No Marks and Full Marks, rather than just switching the values. If you are happy with everything but one value being 0, then I guess you can have more than two ratings. That looks confusing, though, and doesn't allow you to click on a rating to assign varying levels of points. ... View more

@EleanorChlan  I think I understand what you're asking, but I must not be. I'm not sure how to answer it any clearer than what I wrote in my post showing the hack. This trick works only if you have exactly two ratings for a criterion. It cannot be used for varying levels of lateness within a rubric. If there are more than two ratings, then it zeros out everything but the first rating. If I'm not following what you're asking, can you please rephrase it so I understand the question better? ... View more

In testing things for my response to Ron ( @Ron_Bowman ), I discovered (I don't know if I'm the first, but I didn't see anyone else doing this) a hack where Canvas will allow you to put a negative point value in a rubric and make it clickable so you do not have to type in the value. It does not negatively impact the score unless it is selected. It is great for things that you don't want to award points for, but do want to take points off for. Disclaimer: Negative points in rubrics are not supported by Canvas. They take great but imperfect -- which is why this hack works -- lengths to make sure you don't use negatives. I cannot recommend this as I'm not sure what else might break, but here it is. This trick works only if you have exactly two ratings for a criterion. It cannot be used for varying levels of lateness within a rubric. If there are more than two ratings, then it zeros out everything but the first rating. You really need to change description from "Full Marks" to something else, like "Late Work". This is what you will click on to take off points and it is going to be confusing to the students to see "Full Points" with a negative point value.  You must do this before you use the hack. Do that before step 1. If you apply the hack first and then try to change the title, it resets things and you cannot apply the hack. The example rubric I'm using has three criteria. The first is regular points, which is the way Canvas intends for people to use the rubrics. The second criterion uses the same point value for both (the trick Ron was showing) and then allows you to enter a negative number. The third is the hack I discovered. The assignment is worth 10 points. I want to take off 5 points for being late. I want to be able to take off varying number of points using Ron's hack. There is really just one step to the process. I numbered them so you could see what it looks like along the way and why people might think this isn't what they want. Enter a negative point value for the criterion points (not the rating points) when creating the criterion. I used -5. This changes the "Full Marks" to be worth that many points. Notice that the total points goes to 5 instead of 10. Not what we want. When you click Create (or Update) Rubric, it now switches the position of the No Marks and Full Marks on the criterion with negative point values. Note that it says the third criterion is now worth 0 points instead of -5. However, it still shows the total rubric as being worth 5 points instead of 10. Not what we want since it is a 10 point assignment. Refresh the page. Do a happy dance. The negative rating is still here (good), the points are still 0 (good), and the total points for the rubric is now 10 (excellent). I enabled using the rubric for grading and then went into SpeedGrader. I clicked on 10 points Full Marks for the regular criterion, manually typed -1 for the same point criterion (Ron's hack), and clicked on the -5 points Full Marks (which I should have renamed before I started) for the negative points. It correctly calculated the score as 4 out of 10 points. This is what it looks like to the student viewing the rubric. Again, change the wording "Full Marks" to something else before you make the points negative. This hack works if you want to type in a negative point value. Let's say that I wanted to take off varying levels of points for being late. I could set the most I would take off to be 5 as shown, but then type a different number in the points box instead of clicking on it. It will not highlight a rating since the points don't match, but it still make sense. If you make the "Full Marks" be the "Full Deduction" (or something similar), then a greater (less negative) value in the points would indicate to the student that they didn't lose all of the points they could. I'm not going to change my rubric importer script to support this. I've got too many other things going on and I still don't know what consequences using a negative point in a rubric has for other analytics people might run that assume the values are non-negative. You can use the rubric importer to import a criterion with two ratings and then edit the rubric after it is imported to change the point value for the criterion to be negative. ... View more

In testing things for this message, I discovered a limited way to add negative points to a rubric. It's kind of a hack and I have not fully investigated. Basically, rubrics are not designed for negative values and so using them gets into undefined territory and who knows what will happen. I will post it as a top-level response rather than buried several layers deep. My import a rubric script does not support negative numbers in the rubric itself because Canvas does not support negative numbers in a rubric rating. There is a programming anomaly that allows people to enter up to -1. It's part of their check to make sure that the points for the rating are in order. As you move from right to left, they do not want the rating points to decrease. However, instead of initializing the value to the right-most rating, they initialize it to -1. Then they make sure that each rating is never less than the previous as you move from right to left. If you try to put -2 in there, then -2 is less than -1 and it corrects it for you since you obviously don't know what you're doing 🙂 However, if you put -0.5, then -0.5 is not less than -1, and it lets it pass. Even -1 is not less than -1, so it should allow you to put a -1, just nothing less than -1 in there. If you want to enter negative point values, like @Ron_Bowman showed, you have to manually type them, you cannot select them by clicking. Making it worth 0 points so it doesn't affect the overall score is a nice hack, but there is a potential issue. If you have multiple ratings with the same point value (the two 0's trick Ron used), then the highlighting doesn't work as expected. If you click on one of the ratings with the same value, then it remembered that rating, but if you typed in the point value, it would pick the first one that matched (left to right). If it doesn't match a typed value, then neither was highlighted (as expected). ... View more

@TamzRoll  It still works for me. Do you have the latest version of the script? I updated it May 22, 2022, to fix some missing data issues and it's now up to version 16. ... View more

@BenjaminWerner  The request makes sense. My question would be if it would be better to use a different tool than RollCall. I believe it was written at the request of a school a long time ago and it works for what it does, but it's definitely not up to the support level of most Instructure products. In Encanto's world, RollCall might be named Bruno. Since there is no public API, you would need to open the developer tools in your browser and monitor the traffic that is sent to RollCall. What happens when you click on a student to mark them as present (or any of the states)? Basically, you're reverse engineering what Canvas does and then making your code do the same thing. When I wrote the code to gather the attendance reports, I did look at admin page I needed. It was a form but it was delivered from rollcall.instructure.com rather than <instance>.instructure.com. I downloaded the page and completed the form using JavaScript (I used JSDom) and then submitted it. That might have been necessary to get the right authorization header. RollCall is not like the REST API that you can include a token that you can get from inside Canvas directly. It uses a JWT in the authorization: bearer header. In theory, you can use JWT. For all the smarts people think I have, I've never been able to figure JWT out. I find that severely limiting with the new features that come out that only work with JWT. My approach bypassed the need for me to compute JWTs because I was using their form and their tokens. Canvas has said that they are moving toward using a gateway so that all products can be reached from one location. I've found the documentation on that lacking. The last I checked, they weren't allow introspection. That meant that you could not view the docs to see what you needed to do, which meant you already had to know what you were doing. That brings me back to reverse engineering the API calls they make. But it may be possible that you could use that gateway to contact RollCall. I cannot comment on that more than a possibility. I have not looked into it. The interface would need to be on the instructor's side of things. Your system would need to collect the information and then, as the instructor, push it into RollCall. That's why I wonder if it would be easier to make your own attendance system. Of course, if you are forced to use RollCall, then you don't have a choice. I guess the short answer is that you should be able to launch a sessionless external tool and then do everything there that you could do if it was an iframe inside Canvas. I did have to manage cookies. Without going into the specifics of each routine, it went something like this. Get the tool ID for RollCall. Get the sessionless launch, masquerading as a specific user. I think this might have been to make sure the email got sent to the proper location. I used my REST API access token to do this. Take the URL from that and fetch it. That delivered a form. I grabbed all of the inputs from it and then made a post with a redirect:manual option. Then I get the redirect from that form. Then I looked for a set-cookie header and saved the cookies. Then I looked at the body of the fetch, which is the HTML of the document. Then I parsed it with JSDom, completed the form, and made a POST to submit the form. After step 6, I'm inside RollCall. Your process would be slightly different since you're not completing a form on the admin page. ... View more

@Nva2023  Canvas does allow for differentiated assignments through the API. In the API, it's called Assignment Overrides. In particular, you would need to look at the Create an assignment override endpoint. I haven't done anything with this because it's not worth my time. I usually only have a couple of accommodations that need given and they are never for extended dates (my assignments are usually open a few days after they are due anyway). I do have some that need extra time on quizzes, but that is a different API call and that only affects a couple of assignments since most are untimed. Someone has likely automated this, but I don't know who. Maybe they'll chime in? ... View more

@CaseyCattron  To follow up on what @GregoryBeyrer  said, you cannot tell Canvas to name them in a different manner through the web interface, but you can use the spreadsheet to change the names in bulk (and using formulas since it is in a spreadsheet). You can also use the Assignments API with programming to modify things. You could even set it up to automate the duplication and renaming process. There is a duplicate assignment endpoint that will return a JSON object with an assignment object that contains the id and name of the duplicate. You could then call the edit an assignment endpoint with the id obtained from the duplicate assignment call and change the name. Since you're doing this programmatically, you would be able to know what the new name was supposed to be. This could then be a command line tool where you tell it the course ID, the assignment ID, and how many times to duplicate it. You could also hard code those values into your source and run it. A person could probably write a userscript that runs in the browser that would modify the existing menu to add a new duplicate button that would automate the two steps. It would take the existing name, determine the pattern to see if it ended in a number and then follow that pattern. Ideally it would check to see if the new number already existed and increment it to make it unique as you indicated. Assignment names do not have to be unique in Canvas (you could have four versions of the final exam all called Final Exam) but it gets confusing to humans. You would also need to write the code to get the new assignment to appear on the assignment page with a working settings menu. Another approach would be to write a script that gets a list of all of the assignments and then programmatically identifies the "Copy" or "Copy 1" and renames them. That script would be ran between the time you duplicate the assignment and the time you actually change the content. That could be a standalone script or userscript that runs in the browser that adds a single button rather than modifying each assignment. Then you could modify the titles on the assignments page without having to worry about inserting new content and all of the assignments would already be loaded so you could get the information you need from the webpage rather than having to make an API call. Ultimately, it comes down to your circumstances. If you're an instructional designer that does this a lot, then coding it would be worth it. If you are an instructor that duplicates a few assignments here and there and then copies the content from one term to the next, then changing them manually is going to be faster. There's a lot of space in between those two scenarios. Coding is a time suck, so it may come down to you and how quickly it needs done. My bio here in the Community mentions hating repetition and spending 13 hours writing code to do something that could be done in 5 minutes, so I get the desire to automate. But sometimes you get given a new course on Friday afternoon that has to be ready to go on Tuesday (thank goodness for the holiday on Monday) that is now online because they couldn't find a teacher for it and there is nothing created (not even a good recent syllabus that identifies what topics are covered). In cases like that [welcome to my weekend], you forget about automation and just push through. ... View more