shenghaozou / canvas-uploader

This is a simple script to upload your grades stored in excel files to Canvas system. You can use your own excel spreadsheets to track comments, and specific grades for each rubrics. It uses selenium and Firefox to simulate user input. It can work on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems.

Title: Canvas-Uploader Instruction Author: Shenghao Zou
Affiliation: University of Wisconsin, Madison Date: Feb, 21 2018

Canvas-Uploader

Introduction

This is a simple script to upload your grade stored in excel files to Canvas system. You can use your own excel spreadsheets to track comments, and specific graders for each rubrics. It used selenium and Firefox to simulate user input. It can work on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems.

Install & Run

To install and run this script, you should firstly install Python 2, selenium, Firefox and geckodriver. (In the past, we used Chrome and chromedriver but it seems Chrome didn't work very well).

1. To install selenium, please run pip install selenium.
2. To install geckodriver, Please click here: Gecodriver Releases Please unzip it in any folder you like and add geckodirver path to system PATH variable. Restart terminal and try which geckodriver to see if you can access to it.

To run the code, you should first make sure your configuration is correct, then run python submit_firefox.py [Your Spreadsheet Name].xlsx. Don't do anything when submitting.

Configuration

There are several things you should change before running this script:

1. CANVAS_HOME_PAGE variable: If you are not a UW-Madison student/faculty, change it to your university's Canvas homepage.
2. COURSE_CODE variable: change to your course code. Open your Canvas course homepage. For example, the URL will be:https://canvas.wisc.edu/courses/91385. Here, 91385 is the course number.
3. YOUR_CANVAS_NAME variable: Your first name on Canvas.
4. DELETE_COMMENT variable: By default delete comment feature will be on. It will delete repeated comments written by you. Sometimes, the script fails and it can help you to avoid multiple same comments. If you don't need this feature, please set this variable to 0.
5. USER_NAME variable: Change it to your Canvas user name.

Excel File Format

Please take a look of my example.xlsx file for more information. The script needs Student ID for matching. To get that, you can export a csv file from Canvas Grade page and you can find SID there.