Generating a random order for students to select their internships (or anything really)

By automatically retrieving the list of students from Canvas

Last updated on Jul 29, 2020 3 min read R, rcanvas, canvas

R script to generate random numbers merged with a list of student names retrieved from Canvas

My students have to choose where they want to have their internship in societal psychology. Since some internships seems to be more popular, I make a random list of numbers from 1:number of students which I then merge with the list of student names retrieved from Canvas. This then becomes the order in which the students select their internships.

Since I do this twice per semester every year, I made this (highly overengineered) solution using R.

# Load libraries
require(tidyverse) # For data management
require(rcanvas)   # To connect to Canvas
require(openxlsx)  # To output to MS Excel
require(readr)     # To output to csv

Get userinfo for specific course

You will need to input the id for the specific course you want to retrieve student info from. I have added a YOURID placeholder to indicate where this has to be entered. See my previous post for how to retrieve all your Canvas courses, and for how to search that list for a specific course. You will also have to add your Canvas access token and the correct server before you can continue. This was described in my previous post.

The rcanvas::get_course_items() functions has options to get only the students, but in my case this does not retrieve their email addresses. I therefore retrive all users in the course, then the students, and then merge the email address with the students names using dplyr::inner_join().

If you require it, you also have a simple way of making a list with the same information for teachers using a dplyr::anti_join().

# Get info for all users Canvas
list_of_users <- get_course_items(
  course_id = YOURID, item = "users", include = "email"
  )      

# Get only students, but no email so we must merge 
list_of_students <- get_course_items(
  course_id = YOURID, item = "students", include = "email"
  ) 

# Merge in the email adress
students_with_email <- dplyr::inner_join(list_of_students, 
                                         select(list_of_users, login_id, email), 
                                         by = "login_id", copy = F
                                         )  
# Need a list of teachers as well?
# teachers_with_email <- dplyr::anti_join(
#   list_of_users, list_of_students, by = "id"
#   )

Generate the random numbers

# Generate a random number from 1:the number of students
draw_order <- sample(1: length(students_with_email$name), length(students_with_email$name)) 

# Merge the random string of numbers with the dataframe containing student info
students_with_email_number <- cbind(students_with_email, draw_order) 

# Order the lsit of students by their placement in the draw
students_with_email_number <- students_with_email_number %>% arrange(draw_order)

Save the resulting data frame to Excel and csv.

Since I will publish this list back to Canvas, I only retain the name of the students and their placement in the draw in the files that I store. I use dplyr::select() to keep only these two variables.

# as xls
students_with_email_number %>% 
  select(name, draw_order) %>%    
  openxlsx::write.xlsx(., "yourfile.xlsx")                                             

# as csv
students_with_email_number %>% 
  select(name, draw_order) %>%    
  readr::write_csv(., "yourfile.csv")
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Avatar
Tormod Bøe
Research director at Norce and Professor of Community Psychology at UiB

My research interests are societal psychology, and social inequalities in mental health in children and adolescents.

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