Check course submissions and forums by asking in plain English
Idea + starter prompt, not run by us yet
For: Educators who spend time each week checking missing work and forum activity
A non-developer educator spent four months with Claude Code building a Python MCP server for Canvas. It started as a small tool that listed courses. It grew to handle assignments, forum threads, announcements and gradebook exports, and the API tokens stay in environment variables. Student data anonymisation was added later.
Steps
- Check you have Canvas API permission from your school.
- Keep API tokens in environment variables, never in chat.
- Start with simple questions like listing courses.
- Turn on student data anonymisation before you look at real records.
- Check any summary against Canvas before acting on it.
Starter prompt
Help me build a small tool that connects to my [learning platform] through its API. My API token is in a local environment variable. Never print it. Start with one feature: list my current courses. Then add: find students with missing submissions for [assignment]. Read only. Do not post announcements, change grades or message students. Hide student names in any output unless I ask. Show me the plan first.
Original post: Substack · found via agentusecases.ai. Written up in our own words. We haven't run it, so test it on made-up data first.