08 DEC 2025
David's problem: Canvas courses with Google Slides links instead of downloadable files produce empty lecture notes
David traced a full class of broken lecture notes generations to courses where all content was stored as external Google Slides links rather than Canvas file uploads, and led the discussion on how to handle this upstream in the planner.
A Notre Dame signup revealed a Spanish course where none of the lecture notes had any inserted slides — just text summaries. David pushed past the surface explanation:
why didn't it download the google slides? and for that course, how much of the content is posted as google slides links or just links to external sites in general vs how much of it is actual canvas topic files?
The investigation found 71 module topics for the Spanish course: 24 page topics, all containing only external docs.google.com/presentation/... links; zero file topics. David then guided the discussion toward the correct architecture:
im more concerned about the cases where there's an external link to something like slides or panopto or google docs or any external link that links to a file (a non-video file)
He pushed back on the agent's plan to "neutralise" certain lecture-note slots and insisted the real fix was upstream in the module planner manifest — classifying external materializable documents differently from page-only runs so they either trigger a user upload prompt or are handled via a dedicated resolution path.