ceven

Canvas

Syncs course content, student grades, and assignment deadlines into your operational workflows, automates student notifications, and aggregates academic performance data for reporting.

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Why use Ceven?

  1. AI native Canvas integration

    • Describe the outcome and Ceven picks the right Canvas calls, fills the parameters, and checks the result.
    • Structured, agent friendly tool schemas so each call runs reliably instead of by guesswork.
    • Rich coverage for reading, writing, and querying your Canvas data, across all 573 of its actions.

  2. Managed auth

    • Built in OAuth with automatic token refresh and rotation.
    • One place to manage, scope, and revoke Canvas access.
    • Per user and per environment credentials instead of shared keys.

  3. Agent optimized design

    • Actions are tuned from real success and error rates so reliability climbs over time.
    • Full execution logs so you always know what ran in Canvas, when, and on whose behalf.
    • The agent pauses and asks when Canvas is unclear instead of plowing ahead.

  4. Enterprise grade security

    • Fine grained access so you control which agents and people can reach Canvas.
    • Least privilege by default, read scopes first and only the writes a workflow needs.
    • A full audit trail of every Canvas action to support review and sign off.

Supported tools

Every action Ceven's agents can run on Canvas, and when to use it.

Create assignment
Use this when a workflow needs to push a new graded task into a course with specific due dates and point values.
Create discussion topic
Start a new forum thread in a course to trigger student engagement or post a class announcement.
Create module
Organize course content by creating a new structural module with specific prerequisites or availability dates.
Create page
Push a new wiki page with HTML content into a course to deliver lecture notes or resources.
Create quiz
Set up a new assessment in a course, including the assignment group for grading purposes.
Get current grades
Pull aggregated grade data for a specific account to identify students who are falling behind.
Get course activity
Pull daily page views and participation events to measure how often students access course materials.
Get all assignments
List every assignment in a course to audit deadlines or sync them with an external calendar.
Get all users
Pull a list of all users in an account, filtered by role or enrollment status.
Create conversation
Send a direct message to one or more students or teachers within the Canvas inbox.
Create enrollment
Add a user to a course with a specific role, such as student or observer.
Create calendar event
Add a date to the course calendar for exams, holidays, or project milestones.
Fetch data
Pull a generic category of Canvas data like accounts or courses using boolean flags.
Get term grade data
Pull department level grade distributions for a specific academic term.
Create account notification
Creates a global notification within a canvas account, ensuring `end at` is after `start at` and any specified `notification roles` are valid.
Create appointment group
Creates a new appointment group in canvas for schedulable time slots within specified course or group contexts.
Create an assignment
Creates a new assignment within a specified course in canvas lms.
Create assignment override
Creates an assignment override to adjust due/unlock/lock dates for an assignment in a course, targeting specific students (requires `title`), a group, or a course section; at least one target (`student ids`, `group id`, or `course section i
Create communication channel
Creates a new communication channel (e.g., email, sms, push) for an existing canvas user to receive notifications.
Create content share
Shares a canvas content item to specified users, if the sender has necessary permissions and receiver ids are valid.
Create a course
Creates a new course in canvas within a specified account, with comprehensive configuration options.
Create discussion entry
Tool to create a new entry in a canvas discussion topic. use when posting a message with optional attachments to a discussion topic.
Create Folder
Creates a new folder in canvas within a specified context (e.g., course, user) and optional parent folder; ensure the context and any parent folder (specified by id or path, not both) already exist.
Create a page for a course
Creates a new wiki page in a specified canvas course, with options for title, html body, editing permissions, publication, and designation as front page (which also requires publication).
Create a quiz question
Creates a new question for an existing quiz within a course; if `answers` are provided, their structure must align with `question type`, and any `quiz group id` must be valid for an existing group in the quiz.
Delete appointment group
Permanently deletes an existing appointment group by its id; associated appointments may also be canceled or affected.
Delete an assignment
Soft deletes a specific assignment within a course, returning the assignment object with its `workflow state` updated to 'deleted'.
Delete a folder
Permanently deletes an existing folder specified by its unique id.
Delete quiz
Permanently deletes the quiz identified by `quiz id` from the course identified by `course id`; this action cannot be undone.
Edit assignment
Updates an existing assignment in a canvas course (identified by `course id` and `assignment id`); only attributes explicitly provided in the request are modified.

30 actions · scroll to see them all

Frequently asked questions

Canvas employs a leaky bucket rate limiting strategy that can throttle requests if an agent attempts to pull too much data too quickly. Ceven manages this by implementing an intelligent queuing system that respects the X Rate Limit headers returned by the Canvas API. If the agent hits a limit, it automatically pauses and retries the request using an exponential backoff strategy. This ensures that large scale operations, such as pulling grades for an entire university department, do not result in a service outage or a temporary IP ban from the institution's Canvas instance. The user sees a progress bar for long running syncs.
Yes. Ceven operates using the permissions of the authenticated user. If your Canvas account has teacher or designer roles in a specific course, the agent can create assignments, pages, and modules. If you only have student access, the agent will be restricted to read only actions like checking your own grades or viewing course content. If a workflow attempts a write action that your account does not support, Canvas returns a 401 unauthorized error, which Ceven catches and reports as a permission gap in the workflow logs.
Ceven can interact with Blueprint courses by using the standard course and module API endpoints. You can use the agent to push updates to a Blueprint course and then trigger the sync to all associated child courses. However, the agent cannot currently trigger the specific Blueprint sync button via API as that is a proprietary internal Canvas function. You must initiate the sync to child courses manually in the Canvas UI after the agent has finished updating the content in the primary Blueprint shell.
Ceven can navigate the full Canvas account hierarchy from the root account down to sub accounts and individual courses. When you connect your account, the agent first calls the Get Canvas accounts endpoint to map the tree structure. This allows you to build workflows that target a specific department or a whole college. You can reference a course by its global ID or by navigating through the account path. The agent automatically resolves the correct account ID for every API call to ensure data is written to the correct organizational unit.
Ceven can read grades and push grade updates to the Canvas gradebook. You can build a workflow that takes a grade from an external tool or a rubric and writes it back to the specific assignment for a student. It is important to note that Canvas treats grade updates as individual API calls. For large classes, the agent batches these updates to avoid hitting API limits. It cannot however use the Canvas SpeedGrader interface since that is a front end tool and not a direct API endpoint.
The agent can create and modify calendar events within the context of a course or a user. This is useful for automating office hour bookings or setting dynamic deadlines based on student progress. When the agent creates a calendar event, it is immediately visible to all students enrolled in that course. You can also use the agent to create appointment groups, which allows students to sign up for specific time slots, effectively turning Canvas into a scheduling tool managed by your AI workflows.
Ceven follows strict data privacy protocols and does not store student PII longer than necessary to execute a workflow. All data transmitted between Ceven and Canvas is encrypted using TLS. Access is managed via OAuth 2.0, meaning Ceven never sees your Canvas password. You can restrict the agent's access by adjusting the scopes in your Canvas settings. Because education data is sensitive, we provide a detailed audit log showing every single API call the agent makes, including exactly what data was read or written.
Yes. The agent can initiate an asynchronous export of course content into Common Cartridge or ZIP formats. Because exports can take a long time for large courses, the agent does not wait for the file to be ready. Instead, it starts the export, monitors the progress URL provided by Canvas, and notifies you via a webhook or email once the download link is available. This allows you to automate the archiving of courses at the end of every semester without manual intervention.

Alternatives to Canvas

Other tools that solve a similar problem. Ceven supports these too, so you can switch or run more than one at once.

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