Note: LMS Dash is currently in beta. Unexpected errors may occasionally happen.
LMS Dash is available on the Chrome Web Store
LMS Dash is your Canvas assistant that is always ready in your browser. This browser extension helps instructors, instructional designers, and administrators spend less time on managing Canvas and more time on delivering great courses. LMS Dash simplifies course and LMS management tasks by offering features that are not natively available in Canvas. Here are some of the things LMS Dash can do:
- Scan Courses
- (More features coming soon)
One of the most important features of LMS Dash is the course scanner. Do your courses have old addresses, old links, wrong contact information, or retired faculty names that need to be removed or updated? LMS Dash can help you find these in your own courses and (if you are a Canvas admin) help you find these in every course in a term. You scan course pages, assignments, announcements, and more for specific text. You can also scan the HTML of course items to find links, in-line CSS styling, and more! LMS Dash will show you in which course it found the text and give you a link directly to the item where it was found.
If you need a specific feature that is not already built into LMS Dash, consider becoming a contributor. However, the feature must be broadly useful and not introduce potential security vulnerabilities.
You may also extend or modify LMS Dash for you own personal needs by using the source files to build a local version and running it in Chrome's developer mode. This will also let you build a version with a modified manifest, so you can run it on non-"instructure.com" domains. Be careful to not use a wildcard match because doing so is a security vulnerability and could slow down your browser. Be sure to follow the AGPL-3.0 License regarding any modifications.
LMS Dash follows the Manifest v3 spec for browser extensions and is made to work with Google Chrome. The browser extension consists of three main parts:
- Side Panel - A React app that runs in Chrome's side panel.
- Background Script - The main controller of the application that coordinates large tasks and message passing.
- Content Script - Interacts with Canvas by fetching and posting data via the Canvas API.
Some code is shared among all three parts, and these are in the shared directory.
Dependencies: Animate.css, Radix UI Primitives, React, React Select, Rollup.js, TanStack Query, Tailwind CSS, Vite
- Clone the repository.
git clone https://github.com/seanbeirnes/lmsdash-browser-extension.git- Navigate to the root directory.
cd lmsdash-browser-extension/- Install the npm packages.
npm install- Build!
Option 1: Build the dev version (Runs slower due to extra logging)
npm run devOption 2: Build the production version
npm run buildThe build will be in the "dist" directory. This is where you will need to tell Chrome to look for the extension.