Lms Assignment Fetcher

The problem

Manually tracking deadlines and student progress across multiple Canvas courses is time-consuming and prone to oversight. Educators and advisors lack a consolidated view of missing submissions and upcoming due dates without clicking through individual course shells.

What it does

• Authenticates with the Canvas REST API using scoped bearer tokens to pull real-time academic data.
• Aggregates active courses, modules, and assignments into a single dataset.
• Identifies missing student submissions by filtering assignment workflow states.
• Generates weekly deadline summaries sorted by chronological priority.
• Handles API pagination automatically to ensure complete data retrieval for large enrollments.

Frameworks & tools

Canvas LMS REST API, curl, and jq for JSON processing.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

General LLMs often struggle with the specific syntax of Canvas API pagination headers and date-math filtering in jq. This skill provides the exact logic for rel="next" link headers and ISO8601 timestamp comparisons required for reliable automated reporting.

Use cases

• Automate a Monday morning email report of all assignments due within the next seven days.
• Generate a list of students who have not yet submitted a specific high-stakes assessment.
• Build a grade rollup dashboard for academic advisors to monitor student health.
• Export course structures and module lists for curriculum auditing.

Known limitations

Requires an active Canvas instance and a manually generated Access Token with appropriate read scopes. Does not support posting grades or scraping web content outside the REST API.