cca/libraries_syllabus_notifications

send email reminders to upload syllabi from a CSV

Faculty Syllabus Notifications

Take a CSV of missing syllabi VAULT report and send emails to faculty about which syllabi we expect from them. We skip notifying faculty for courses which do not require syllabi (e.g. Graduate Studio Practice) and work around problematic faculty values like "Staff" and "Standby".

Setup

Usual Python projects steps and configure a .env file with values for SMTP domain, port, user, and password (see example.env). Consult Mailgun or the Moodle outgoing mail configuration for these values.

> pipenv install
> cp reminders/example.env reminders/.env
> vim reminders/.env # edit in real values
> pipenv shell # run inside the virtual environment
> python cli.py -h # view usage information, see steps below

We also need access to the "integration files source" Google Storage Bucket. Once our CCA account has access permission, we use Application Default Credentials to allow this project access. This should be a matter of installing gcloud and running gcloud auth application-default login once.

Steps

• enter the virtual environment, pipenv shell
• update course data & faculty usernames, python cli.py -u
• run VAULT's "Missing Syllabi by Semester" report (python cli.py -o opens it)
• convert the report to CSV. Copy the HTML table and paste it into Google Sheets, then download as CSV. Alternatively, export to Excel then save as CSV after trimming the extraneous top rows (but not the column headers) & date at the bottom.
• (optional, but recommended) run summary stats on our collection progress with python reminders/status.py data/2023-01-26-Spring_2023.json data/report.csv
• finally, run python cli.py data/report.csv to send emails, use the --template flag to specify one of:
  • initial (default)
  • followup (sent ≈2 weeks later)
  • final (sent another ≈2 weeks later)
  • summer (exception because we only send one reminder, with no due date)

Testing

There are pytest tests, but not much coverage. The testing utilities are written as pipenv scripts in the Pipfile.

pipenv run test # run tests
pipenv run coverage # test coverage
pipenv run report # coverage report

Other Notes

We can dry-run the app by setting a DEBUG environment variable (or .env value) to True. Run DEBUG=true python cli.py report.csv to test the script, for instance. The DEBUG env var can also be used to debug issues with Google Cloud authentication, e.g. DEBUG=True python reminders/update_usernames.py.

We can use "has_syllabus.py" to count the number of rows in a CSV of courses which have syllabi:

> python reminders/has_syllabus.py data/report.csv
760 courses have syllabi of 806 total in the CSV

Report Format

Report CSV should have the following columns with this exact header row

"Semester","Department Code","Course Title","Instructor(s)","Section"

Some of the columns are not used but these are the ones typically contained in the VAULT report.

LICENSE

ECL Version 2.0

libraries_syllabus_notifications's Issues

update email sig to be Dominick Tracy's

Dominick is handling the syllabus collection this year & not Tom.

switch to pytest

Going to be easier to test the CLI aspect as well as functions. See the Flask tutorial for an example of working with pytest.

automate course JSON download as part of update usernames script

See the TODO in the readme. Could either be shelling out to gsutil or using a Google Python library.

sentence on course inaccuracies

Add a sentence to the first reminder about correcting inaccurate course information, since we're planning to send the week before classes start and those will likely be more numerous.

migrate project to libraries' wagtail site

Right now, we run these scripts on a random locally-hosted server running openEQUELLA simply because it's what I have ssh access to. Since it's python, it makes sense to incorporate it into the Wagtail website, as we have done with other utilities like the Summon deletes task.

can we add schema.org actions to emails?

https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/?hl=en

These highlight actions right from the inbox, you don't even need to click into the email. Could link up the Syllabus contribution form via a login.do?page= link. A ViewAction seems to be the specific type of markup we'd want.

Our emails are plain text which makes me think we may not be able to add the markup.

chair VAULT links per term

Send program chairs an email (≈a week after the final faculty reminder) linking to their syllabi from the present term. The VAULT links look like this:

https://vault.cca.edu/logon.do?page=%2Fhierarchy.do%3Ftopic%3D17c784ec-650f-4381-8492-f1a3edf7d8c0%3ACERAM%2Cf416503d-ff0a-47f3-aaaa-93b7ea083873%3AFine%252BArts%252BDivision%2C289af057-1502-498a-b73a-259f26b968c0%3ASpring%252B2024%26sort%3Dname

this is for Ceramics under the Fine Arts Division for Spring 2024. You can see those strings in the URL; all we need to do is adjust the parameters for other programs/semesters.

Use the "Academic Chair Assignments" Workday report to determine chairs.

move more logic from cli.py to reminders app

The cli should really be a light wrapper over the different components of the reminders app with no business logic itself. So the bit about skipping over invalid faculty names and filtering to the right courses should be broken out into something else.

use Mailgun's SMTP to send mail

Can't we just authenticate with CCA's SMTP server and run this locally, not on a CCA VM at all? I don't remember if I tried this already but it seems like an obvious oversight.