Automatic RollCall Attendance Exporting

Hello,

In lieu of an API call to get attendance into Student Information Systems, is it possible for us to receive a scheduled attendance report and have it automatically mailed to us by Canvas or by the Instructure customer support team on a daily basis?

Thanks,

Guy Mor

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Accepted answers

James

@GuyMor

It is possible, but not trivial, to tell Canvas to automatically generate and email the attendance report.

When you launch the attendance report from the Admin > Attendance > Generate Report tab, it launches the RollCall Attendance LTI. That means that if you can get to that page through automation, you can schedule it yourself.

There are a couple of ways to get there.

Use a headless browser such as Puppeteer or Selenium.
Use a program that accesses the API and launches the LTI and then completes the form.

I used the second method (used past tense -- the server that contains the code decided not to recognize its network connection this summer and I cannot reach that server except by logging in at the console. Thankfully, I had the code backed up, but haven't found time to set it up on another system). I would use the API call to get a sessionless launch url for the rollcall LTI, launch it, navigate through the redirects until I got the page with the form. Then I would fill out the form and submit it three times (once for each of the three previous weeks to give faculty a chance to catch up with a backlog of entry), and then wait for the emails to come. I had the email setup so that it went to a special account that intercepted it and processed the file automatically, adding the information to a database that was available locally for analysis.

The first way may be easier if you can get logged into Canvas through the browser in an automatic way. You would still go to the form, but it would be inside Canvas. I've done some things with Puppeteer and could probably automate it if I hadn't already written the script to do it through the API.

Whether you intercept the mail and automatically process it or you just send it to someone's email and they manually process it is separate from generating the email.

Getting the information into the SIS is a completely different task than getting it out of Canvas. Our SIS doesn't support attendance, but I was gathering the information for an early alert system.

All comments

Chris_Hofer

@GuyMor ...

I have not heard of anything like this, but that's not to say it doesn't exist. I'd recommend reaching out to your assigned Customer Success Manager team at Instructure to ask about this. If you are not a Canvas administrator, talk to someone who is at your school...such as their Online Learning / eLearning / Distance Education team. Good luck!

James

@GuyMor

It is possible, but not trivial, to tell Canvas to automatically generate and email the attendance report.

There are a couple of ways to get there.

Use a headless browser such as Puppeteer or Selenium.
Use a program that accesses the API and launches the LTI and then completes the form.

Whether you intercept the mail and automatically process it or you just send it to someone's email and they manually process it is separate from generating the email.

Getting the information into the SIS is a completely different task than getting it out of Canvas. Our SIS doesn't support attendance, but I was gathering the information for an early alert system.

GuyMor

Thank you so much James,

This is definitely the direction I was hoping for. I figured out the part where I can extract a file from the HTML link in a similar way to what you describe. Once its a csv on my end, I can figure out the API into the SIS.

Could you clarify the workflow you used once you launched the sessionless LTI please:

What I understood is that you (ingeniously) spun up a server with just the RollCall, and then basically went in and manually scheduled the reports in bulk, and that you did so after the attendance was taken (please correct me if I misunderstood).

1) Could you have scheduled it in advance of the attendance? Say, at the beginning of a semester coulf you have scheduled a report that would trigger at a future date, the end of every week for 15 weeks?

2) How could I account for multiple courses with the seassionless LTI? I see the call gets the courses and the account, does the interface then give you a choice of these, essentially allowing you to take attendance of any course and by extension report for any course? could it report an all the courses too?

3) Could you see an RPA like MS Power Automate or Uipath automating this part as well, perhaps daily for each course?

4) Is the source code to run the LTI outside of Canvas something you are willing to share? of course, taking out any keys or URLs that are related to your instance

GuyMor

Thanks James,

This is valuable information, it's encouraging that the export is for the entire institution. This also shows me that it's possible, though convoluted.

Uipath is a SaaS service that creates robots that click and execute actions on screen. A local version would be something like Keyboard Maestro on a mac or Macro Express on Windows.

I'll report if I make any breakthrough on my end.

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