Overview
The U-M Maizey Canvas Connector is a tool that integrates the university's in-house AI platform with Canvas. This integration offers students a 24/7 intelligent assistant within their courses, able to answer course-specific questions, clarify concepts, and provide information about upcoming assignments and deadlines. The U-M Maizey Canvas Connector enhances student engagement and simplifies the learning experience.
Prepare Your Course
Before you get started with your Maizey project, there are a couple items to take care of first.
- Billing Shortcode
- Make sure you have a billing shortcode (contact your department). Although Maizey is currently free until the end of the Summer 2024 term, a billing shortcode is required to create a project. See: AI Services Pricing for additional details.
- Enroll Maizey User
- Enroll the user, itsaistu, in your course. This user account is how Maizey interacts with your course to index data. See: Enrolling Maizey User
Maizey works by creating an index of your course content including:
- Announcements
- Assignments
- Files
- Modules
- Pages
Note: Maizey can only index content it can access based on the role you give the itsaistu account in your course. See: Enrolling Maizey User for details.
Create a Maizey Project
Once you have your Canvas course set up and you have acquired a billing shortcode, you can create your Maizey project.
- Navigate to the Maizey homepage.
- Click Create New Project.
- Fill in the details of your project:
- Project Name: We recommend to use or at least include your course name.
- Project Path: The path will be part the URL that you and your students will use to access the Maizey tool for your course. For example, if you use my-course-name as the path, the URL would be https://umgpt.umich.edu/maizey/my-course-name
- Select Data Source: In the drop down menu, select Data from a Canvas course.
- Click Submit to continue.
- On the next screen you will be prompted to select your campus. Choose Flint in the drop down menu and click Submit.
- You will then be prompted to select a course. Any course that you teach will be listed in the drop down. Select a course and click Submit.
Note: You will not be able to proceed past this step if you have not enrolled the itsaistu account in your course.
- You will see a confirmation message that your course has been linked. Close that tab of your browser to return to the rest of the Maizey project setup.
- Back on the project settings tab enter the remaining details:
- Title: The title is what is displayed on the Maizey tool page when your students access it.
- Description: The description shows beneath the title and should be a short blurb about what the tool's purpose and uses. E.g. "A helpful AI assistant designed to facilitate learning, explain course concepts, and answer questions about the course."
- Click Submit to proceed.
- The next screen will prompt you to set the Artificial Intelligence Settings. The default options will suffice in most cases. If you would like to discuss these options in further details or get assistance with creating a system prompt, contact ODE.
IMPORTANT: if you opt to modify your system prompt, do not remove the existing prompt. Add your modifications above the existing prompt. Removing the default options will prevent the tool from working properly.
- Click Submit to finish.
- You will now be on the project details page. On the right side, look for Task Activity. You should see "maizey.index_documents" with a green circle and a checkmark next to it. That indicates that the tool has finished indexing the content in your course and it is ready for use.
Note: If you have a lot of content, this may take some time, in which case the task will say "Pending".
When the indexing has finished your Maizey tool is ready to use.