| name | canvas-faculty |
| description | How to use the SysEng Canvas Faculty Assistant (the ask_canvas tool) to answer questions about the user's OWN Cornell Canvas courses and students — listing courses, rosters, student search, cross-course overlap, grade trajectory, and assignment analytics. Use whenever a Cornell Systems Engineering faculty member asks about their Canvas courses, their students, grades, submissions, or course analytics. FERPA-sensitive — prefer aggregates. |
Canvas Faculty Assistant
The ask_canvas tool answers questions about the user's own Cornell Canvas courses and
students. It runs a Cornell-hosted agent with read-only Canvas tools, scoped to the user's
personal Canvas token, so it only ever sees courses where the user is a teacher/TA/designer.
When to use it
- The user asks about their Canvas: how many courses they teach, who is in a course,
finding a student, students shared across courses, a student's grade trajectory, or
per-assignment analytics (means, submission/late rates).
- Prefer it for anything that needs live Canvas data for the user's own courses.
How to ask
- Pass the user's question (or a faithful paraphrase) as
question. Specifics help —
include a course ID, term, student name/NetID, or assignment when known.
- Relay the returned
answer. If the user asked for a count or list, surface it directly.
FERPA / privacy (important)
- This is student data. Prefer aggregates (counts, rates, distributions) over dumping
full rosters or per-student grades.
- Do not copy student names, NetIDs, or grades into files, artifacts, web searches, or
other tools unless the user explicitly asks for an export.
- The assistant is read-only and scoped to the user; it cannot see other faculty's data
and cannot modify Canvas.
Examples
- "How many courses am I teaching this term?" → count + a couple of course names.
- "List students in course 12345." → roster (relay concisely; avoid re-pasting elsewhere).
- "Assignment analytics for course 12345" → per-assignment means / submission / late rates.
- "Which students are in both course 111 and 222?" → overlap list.
Caveats
- If you see a 403 the cohort gate key is wrong/missing; a 401 means the user's
Canvas token is missing or expired — point them to the plugin settings / ONBOARDING.md.
- Canvas data is live; large rosters may take a few seconds.
