Save time and improve efficiency when managing your Canvas courses with our Canvas scripts.
Streamline tasks like bulk downloading student submissions, staggering quiz start times, and simplifying grading workflows. Our scripts can help free up your time from tasks that can be automated, such as assigning peer reviews by class section or grading a discussion based on weekly participation.
Scripts are particularly useful for large classes where you’re managing hundreds of students at once. By automating and batching repetitive processes, you can conduct your courses efficiently and accurately while saving valuable time.
Submit a request and Arts ISIT will set up and operate the script for you—you do not need any technical knowledge to have a script running for your course.
How do the scripts work?
Our scripts use Python, a programming language, and the Canvas API to automate tasks within the Canvas learning platform. The Canvas API is a toolset that provides access to Canvas commands and queries.
This means that we can leverage code to quickly retrieve, update, and manage course data like assignments or grades instead of executing actions manually.
Examples of scripts
We’ve developed numerous scripts that are ready to use for your Canvas courses. Below are a few examples and their possible applications.
Download all assignment submissions in a course including SpeedGrader annotations and comments. The script will generate folders for each assignment that store submissions and feedback organized by student name.
Use case: Keep a record of all student submissions along with comments and annotations for archival purposes.
Organize students into groups alphabetically to set different assignment or quiz availability times. You can specify the quantity of groups and course sections to stagger. The script will create separate “Assign To” fields in the assessment where you can add unique start, end, and due dates for each group of students.
Use case: Stagger the start times of a quiz so that student groups begin five minutes apart. This improves Canvas and Wi-Fi performance for large courses by easing the network load and minimizing technical issues when many students open a quiz simultaneously.
Canvas’s automatic assignment peer review functionality assigns reviewers indiscriminately across all sections of a course. This script allows peer reviews to be automatically assigned only to students in the same section, eliminating the need for you to manually assign reviewers by section.
Use case: Assign peer reviews to students in the same discussion/lab section to improve participation and collaboration. This also allows TA graders to only assess submissions and peer reviews of students in their discussion/lab section.
Automatically evaluate student participation in discussions by tracking how often they post within a specified time frame. The script generates a spreadsheet with columns for each participation window and corresponding student scores, ready to be copied into the Canvas Gradebook. You can set custom date ranges for each window and define how frequently students must post to earn a completion mark.
Use case: Run a semester-long online course with one continuous discussion thread. To promote meaningful, ongoing participation, students are expected to post at least once each week—building on previous replies, responding to classmates, and connecting new material to earlier topics. At the end of the semester, the script reviews student activity and identifies who met the participation requirement for each week. The script compiles students’ scores into a spreadsheet that clearly shows completion status for each participation window, making it easy to track and grade ongoing engagement.
Demo
Curious to see these scripts in action? Watch a recording of our Canvas Scripts Workshop to see a demo of the scripts above.
Timestamps
- [0:58 – 2:43] What are scripts and what can they do?
- [2:57 – 5:26] About Arts ISIT’s script service
- [5:32 – 12:40] Summary of Arts ISIT’s developed scripts and their applications
- [13:21 – 17:14] Script demo: Bulk assignment submissions downloader
- [17:28 – 24:51] Script demo: Stagger assignment and quiz start times
- [25:21 – 29:14] Script demo: Assign intra-section peer reviews
- [29:24 – 35:29] Script demo: Auto grade discussions based on repeated participation
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