OwlAuxilium

Temple University, Japan Campus Canvas Enhancement Suite: Course Categorizer, Comment Bank, Discussion Stats, Quick Groups & Others

Canvas LMS is powerful, but it wasn't built with your Tuesday morning routine in mind. OwlAuxilium is a collection of multiple purpose-built tools that plug into Canvas and handle some repetitive tasks that slow you down between classes. New in v1.3.7: Canvas Quizzer is out of preview, currently for Temple University, Japan Campus faculty only. Generate Safe Exam Browser config files, announce them to your students from a template you write once, and lock the course down while the exam runs. Zoom Attendance Import. Turn a Zoom participants export into a finished Qwickly attendance record. Icebreaker Cafe. A timed group mixer built for the classroom projector. Your settings now travel with you. Templates, rules and preferences are kept in your own Canvas Files, so the extension behaves the same on your office machine and your laptop. What's inside: Course Categorizer: A crowded dashboard is a distraction. Group your courses into collapsible categories by semester, program, or however your brain organizes things. Drag, collapse, search. Your layout sticks across every device. Older Canvas courses can be restored, semesters can be assigned automatically to everything or only to what is still uncategorized, and type-to-search returns grouped results as you type. Quick Actions for the Course Categorizer. Search Announcements followed by the course name. Then hit Enter to automatically go to the Announcements. Canvas Tools: Set due dates across an entire module in one shot. See exactly which students have opened an item and when. Export a quick follow-up list without digging through reports. Discussion Stats: Turn Canvas discussions into a real participation report. Posts, replies, likes, active days, per student, across one topic or many. Export to Excel when you need to record grades. Assignment Comment Bank: Your ten most-used grading comments shouldn't be retyped every semester. Save them once, search them in SpeedGrader, insert with a click. Announcement Bank: Course announcements repeat more than they should. Save reusable announcement templates, organize them by category and tag, import from previous courses, then insert them directly while creating a Canvas announcement. Students do not need the extension because everything is posted through Canvas itself. Quick Groups: Pull today's present students from Qwickly, split them into balanced groups, drag anyone who needs to move, then put it on the big screen or sync straight to Canvas. Icebreaker Cafe: A timed mixer for the first ten minutes of class. It takes the students Qwickly has marked present or tardy, splits them into small groups, and runs a countdown in its own full screen window you can project. Every round reshuffles, and nobody is paired with the same person twice for as long as fresh pairings exist. A student who walks in late can be dropped straight into the round already on screen. Round length, group size and the alarm sound are yours to set, and they are remembered. Zoom Attendance Import: Export the participants list from a Zoom meeting, pick the file, and the extension decides who was present, tardy or absent and fills in the Qwickly record for you. You set what counts: how late is still on time, how late is absent, how early somebody may leave, and the share of the class they have to attend. Names are matched to your roster even when students join as a nickname, a phone, or their name in reverse, and anyone who cannot be placed is handed to you with a searchable roster picker. Whoever you choose is remembered for that class. A class held on an earlier day is recorded as a past session on the right date, tardy and absent marks carry the join and leave times as evidence, and a file that was already imported or looks like it belongs to another class is held back until you confirm. Nothing is written to the page until you press Apply, and nothing is submitted unless you ask for it. Canvas Quizzer (Temple University, Japan Campus faculty only): Prepares a Canvas quiz for Safe Exam Browser, the locked-down browser students use to sit an exam. Generate the .seb file from the quiz page, then download it or send it to your students in a Canvas announcement built from your own template. When the exam starts, lock course materials: the course menu disappears and the Home page shows an exam notice. Unlock afterwards and the course returns exactly as it was, restored from a backup written to your Canvas Files before anything is changed. An IP filter can restrict the quiz to the exam network. Works with quizzes and quiz-style assignments. This module relies on a Temple University, Japan Campus service to build the config file, so it is currently available to TUJ faculty only. Every other tool listed here works on any Canvas instance. What you need: A Canvas LMS account with an instructor role. Quick Groups, Icebreaker Cafe and Zoom Attendance Import read the class list from Qwickly Attendance, so those three need Qwickly at your institution. Canvas Quizzer additionally requires access to the Temple University, Japan Campus exam service, and produces files for Safe Exam Browser, which is free and installed by your students, not by you. Your data: Settings, templates and preferences are stored in a folder inside your own Canvas Files, which is what lets them follow you between computers. Nothing is sold, shared, or sent anywhere for analytics. Student names and attendance stay between your browser and Canvas or Qwickly. The one exception is Canvas Quizzer, which sends the quiz details needed to build a Safe Exam Browser config file to a Temple University, Japan Campus service, and which is only available to TUJ faculty. If you do not use Canvas Quizzer, nothing leaves Canvas. Although the extension was originally developed for Temple University, Japan Campus, it now supports all instructors using Canvas LMS. New features and updates, however, will be driven primarily by TUJ use cases and user requests.