Getting a Canvas API Token
Your own AI agent walks you through getting an API token for your institution's Canvas, checking each step as you go, and you build one small thing with it at the end. Twenty to forty minutes. Many institutions make tokens expire after thirty days; when yours does, the same link renews it.
Institutions hand out tokens differently. At some you make one yourself in Canvas; at others you ask for one, often through a form, and wait for approval. Your agent helps you find out which yours is, and the same link picks up where you left off once your token arrives.
It needs an agent that runs on your computer, such as the Claude desktop app (with Claude Code), Codex, or Cursor. A web chat such as claude.ai usually can't reach your institution's Canvas; if you start there, your agent will say so and ask you to switch.
Your token never leaves your computer. The instructions tell your agent never to ask for it, never to show it, and never to send it anywhere but your own Canvas. Your agent explains all of this before anything starts, and nothing happens until you say yes.
Why Do This
A token lets your agent work in your Canvas courses the way you do, through Canvas's API. Once it has one, it can do the course management you'd otherwise click through page by page: see what's due across all your courses, line up dates and modules for a new term, update pages and assignments, draft announcements, and spot what's missing or inconsistent.
It's also the first step to building your own tools on top of Canvas, ones that fit how you teach rather than how Canvas is laid out. You build a small one before you finish.
Get Your Link
We email you a personal link. Open it, copy one line into your AI agent, and the rest is a conversation between the two of you.
What We Collect
As you go, your agent tells this site which steps you reached, where it stalled and why, the address of your Canvas, which tells us your institution, and what it is: the app it runs in, its model, and your operating system. That is tied to your email, so we can see where this tutorial works, where institutions get in the way, and follow up if you're stuck. If you join the room at one of our sessions, its organizers can see your progress too, so someone can come help. Your agent explains all of this and asks before it starts.
Never your token, nothing from Canvas, and nothing from your conversation. Anything your agent writes in words, it shows you first. If you're stuck, it can send a question to the people who run this, and only when you say so.
Curious what your agent reads? The instructions, as plain text.