Creating a Canvas/Slack integration

Hi Everyone:

I'm a high school Social Studies teacher looking to work on a side project. We have a program called "Tutorial" which is a sort of structured study hall with about 10 students and 2 teachers. I really like Slack as a communication platform and I would like to develop an integration that would post a student's Canvas information to a Slack channel that the tutorial teacher could monitor. For example, past grades or upcoming assignments.

Is there a way to set up Canvas to push that data over to Slack automatically? Or do I need to make cron jobs on some sort of middleware to hit the API and then push the data over to Slack via the Slack API?

I think I can build the latter option (using ColdFusion believe it or not - I'm an old dog from the .com days) but I'm unsure about building something more tightly integrated with Canvas.

Thanks for any ideas!

Sam Dickerman

Brookline High School

Brookline, MA USA

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Accepted answers

tyler_clair

What content were you looking at pushing to Slack? There doesn't look like there is a push mechanism for content in the Canvas API but there is a push communication channel: https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/all_resources.html#method.communication_channels.create (Specifically in the communication_channel[type] request param section). In the Slack there are Bot Users https://api.slack.com/bot-users, that acts much like an IRC bot that responds to commands. It even looks like they have specific user accounts for bots. It uses web sockets to communicate so you could poll a discussion thread or conversation every few seconds or minutes to check for new messages or maybe the push communication channel can monitor that for you and the bot could post those new messages to a Slack channel. It doesn't look like there is a way for it to post as the user but you could still get the message. That is what I have found in the Slack API documentation, although I have never used the Slack API before.

I know you are looking for a side project but if you want to take the easy way out I remember seeing a vendor at InstructureCon called YellowDig https://www.yellowdig.com/. One of their tag lines was something like "Its like Slack for education". That may be an easier route as they already have an LTI integration and mobile apps.

All comments

scottdennis

Hi Sam,

Unfortunately I don't know enough to help you with this but I bet a slack integration would be hugely popular if done right.

tyler_clair

RobDitto

Agreed with @scottdennis , this integration could be awesome!

We use Yellowdig at our institution. It's great, but I think of it more as "Reddit/Pinterest for education" since communication is less chat-like and based more on pins/posts.

unknown

While I don't have a dedicated Slack integration, I've been building off of Github's Hubot framework, which is a generic bot that does have a good Slack adapter.

We have a bot which does some stuff with Canvas, you can checkout the code here:

https://github.com/cs10/Alonzo

Specific scripts which do some Canvas-y things:

https://github.com/cs10/Alonzo/tree/master/scripts/cs10

Right now we have some commands for resetting quiz passwords, inputting scores, and parsing submissions and comments to calculate late days for students.

As far as bots and channels, that configuration is totally manageable with something like Hubot, because you can inspect what channel or room messages are coming from, and pick IDs to use based on that.

Totally happy to answer questions! I'm totally excited about expanding the possibilities of getting meaningful data from Canvas in more formats. Smiley Happy We've been using chatrooms for Berkeley CS classes and it's great, and better methods of querying data would be awesome!

unknown

Hello everyone! We are in development of Slack bot for educational purposes and it have some initial integration with CanvasLMS . We are independent company and not affiliated with Instructure.com, but we really love CanvasLMS as open-source and hiedtech solution and will be glad to implement your ideas about development of this integration.ihttps://twitter.com/lmsbothq/status/903257144539181062

mwolfenstein

I love Slack, but this strikes me as wading into the FERPA danger zone, especially if it involves posting grades and related data that are definitely the type of educational records that are protected.

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