This is my project in honour for having attended the Canvas API Hackathon. I should thank UBC Learning Analytics Project, CAPICO, UBC LAVA, and Sauder Learning Labs on hosting the event. I enjoyed working with educational data, and I liked the feeling of having lots of data on which to have something to do work...
I made this app to help myself where I felt Canvas was lacking. Where the todo list is pushed to the side on the main website, I also thought that opening a web browser was already more effort than necessary to only look at what is next on my assignments list. When I thought about how much time was given to work on this project, I came to the conclusion that something easy is the best choice. I then quickly picked the assignments as my choice to do my work. I decided to make an app that is going to be assistive to the student in a way that is not of the Canvas website features. Alas, my idea is to build a todo list to give ease to students who want earlier access to their assignments.
The project is not complete. I've built preparations to implement OAuth login in case where I were to have developer credentials to complete my third-party app. I do wish to make a more complete implementation, so I would appreciate the missing peices to make more whole of the project. As of now, the app is needing manual replacing of user access token and user_id to make use of the app (those are found on Canvas and sending a request to /api/v1/courses to get a sample of a user_id via curl or printing from the console). I also added some code to manage OAuth logins, but I guess that that is not of this checkpoint. From what is coded, we can view a list of assignments that client did not yet complete (and this is made easier with UI components). I also added notifications when time is almost due to submit an assignment, and that is to only make a more impactful result. The app is ready for use or for upgrades.
Challenges that were faced are reading data that is not well managed. From the assignments data and todo data, I get a "has_submitted_submissions" field that is value 1 when no files are submitted. Thus, assignments data is not feasible on only that field to find the work that a student did not yet complete. My solution is to instead use the todo data which is already returning only assignments that are not complete, though it is maybe returning much less than we want since assignments data is returning many more items (like midterms which is useful to know). A better solution is to know how to separate assignments data from submitted and not submitted. To get all assignments, which is more important than getting a subset, more assignment data review is recommended.