Start a weekly Canvas discussion from Drive planning notes
Give Notis a weekly prompt to turn your course planning notes into a focused Canvas discussion topic.
Trigger
Recurring schedule
Notis starts this workflow on a schedule, such as daily, weekly, or during business hours.
Action
Create discussion topic
Creates a new discussion topic in a specified canvas course, allowing comprehensive configuration of its content, type, publication settings, engagement features, and associations.
Why this helps
Preparing a fresh discussion every week adds another task to an already busy course routine.
- Turn existing planning notes into a discussion starter.
- Reduce recurring preparation work.
- Give learners a consistent place for course questions and next steps.
Setup
Build it in a few focused steps.
- 1Connect Google Drive and Canvas once in the Notis portal.
- 2Create an automation in the portal or tell Notis in plain language.
- 3Describe which planning notes to review and how to turn them into a Canvas discussion topic.
- 4Pick a weekly Notis schedule and choose where run reports should go.
- 5Test with one real set of notes and review the topic before relying on the schedule.
Questions about this workflow
Does this run from a Drive file event?
No. It runs on the Notis schedule you choose, and your instruction should identify the Drive notes to review.
Can I require review before learners see the topic?
Specify the publication preference in your instruction and review reports or the created topic according to your course process.
When this happens · Trigger
Do this · Action
Supported Triggers and Actions
Notis builds workflows that link Google Drive to Canvas. A trigger fires from one place; an action lands in another.
Google Drive triggers
Canvas actions
Recurring trigger
Notis starts this workflow on a schedule, such as daily, weekly, or during business hours.
Create account notification
Creates a global notification within a canvas account, ensuring `end at` is after `start at` and any specified `notification roles` are valid.
Webhook trigger
Notis starts this workflow when an external tool or custom backend sends an HTTP request.
Create appointment group
Creates a new appointment group in canvas for schedulable time slots within specified course or group contexts.
Comment Added (Docs/Sheets/Slides)
Triggers when a new comment is added to Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides.
Create an assignment
Creates a new assignment within a specified course in canvas lms.
File Created
Triggers when a new file is created in Google Drive.
Create assignment override
Creates an assignment override to adjust due/unlock/lock dates for an assignment in a course, targeting specific students (requires `title`), a group, or a course section; at least one target (`student ids`, `group id`, or `course section id`) is required.
File Deleted or Trashed
Triggers when a file is moved to trash or permanently deleted in Drive.
Create Calendar Event
Creates a calendar event with options for recurrence (finite `rrule` series only), section-specific timings, and blackout dates within a specified context.
File Shared (Permissions Added)
Triggers when new sharing permissions are granted to a file or folder. Uses Drive's `changes.list` endpoint with inline `permissions` in the `fields` mask so each change carries the file's current permission set provider-atomically. We diff that against `seen_permission_keys` to identify newly added grants. Drive page tokens are the primary cursor; if Drive rejects a stored token, the trigger raises `PollingTriggerError` without clearing state rather than silently re-baselining and dropping events. Limitation: truly ephemeral permissions (added and revoked between two polls without any other file modification in between) are not detected. Drive Activity API would catch those but requires an additional OAuth scope and a different payload contract.
Create communication channel
Creates a new communication channel (e.g., email, sms, push) for an existing canvas user to receive notifications.
File Updated
Triggers when a file's metadata or content changes in Google Drive.
Create content share
Shares a canvas content item to specified users, if the sender has necessary permissions and receiver ids are valid.
Google Drive Changes
Triggers when changes are detected in a Google Drive.
Create conversation
Use to send messages in canvas by creating a new conversation or adding to an existing one; an existing conversation with the same recipients (and matching scope/filter, if specified) may be reused unless `force new` is true.
Connect any two apps with Notis in the middle.
Google Drive and Canvas, or any other combination from 1,000+ integrations.
When this happens · Trigger
Do this · Action
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