Alright. It is two weeks later, and I have made progress. The issue that I was stuck with the last time i checked in was comically simple, and I was blowing it out of proportion. If you remember, we had been constructing organized names for all of the syllabus files in our Google Drive. It did not properly label the file extensions, instead just putting our placeholder, .checkme , on everything. I was prepared to rewrite basically everything in that section.

All that was needed to was to change a single character.

We grab a certain amount of information about each syllabus file, 6 lines of text to be exact, from the Canvas API, and search that information for a file name. This worked last year, and suddenly stopped this year. We needed a line from the API that included the test “filename”. This was now not returning anything, so I think something changed in the internal API data organization which caused the filename to not be in those six lines anymore. After looking at the raw text, i just needed to grab an extra line. Yay. Problem solved.

My subsequent hurdle was the absolute mess of a CSV that our Course Audit function created, which houses the most information about each course. There would be random new lines and indentations in the CSV every once in a while, on top of cases in which there were multiple or duplicate instructors being completely messed up. The instructor problem is another one that we thought was fixed last year, but somehow returned.

This problem would sadly necessitate a do-over.

I changed the instructor gathering system to grab all of the names of instructors for each course, then find how many unique instructors there are. If multiple unique instructors are listed, they are appended, and if there is a duplicate, we only take one by sorting by unique. As I am writing this, I am realizing that the duplicate instructor and the base case of one instructor do not need to be handled separately, and I can just sort out duplicates regardless, I will change that right away.

I generally test my changes on the current term, which is the Summer semester of 2025. There was not a course that had multiple instructors, so I had Nick create a test course so ensure it worked properly. This course did not have a discipline assigned to it, so now it bugs out and displays every single possible discipline on a new line to the CSV. The likelihood of a course not having a discipline is slim, but I would rather it not happen, so there’s another task.

After that is done, I think most of the coding will be complete. We will be working on more over-arching updates like making it run on Ubuntu and having it run automatically periodically.