08 JAN 2026
David's problem: Canvas courses with Google Slides–only content produce empty lecture workspaces
David identified that a Notre Dame Spanish course served its lecture materials exclusively via Google Slides external links, which the lecture pipeline treated as page-backed runs with no actual content, yielding empty workspace documents.
A Notre Dame user's Spanish course (71 module topics, all 24 page topics linking to external docs.google.com/presentation URLs, zero Canvas file topics) had lecture workspaces that were summaries with no slides content. David asked why the pipeline hadn't downloaded the linked presentations:
why didnt 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? go do a deep investigation into everything posted for that course
The investigation found the pipeline treated those pages as page-backed runs, extracted their HTML (which was just a link), and produced shallow text. David used this to frame a broader architectural requirement — when course content is entirely in external docs/presentations, the system needed an upload-prompt fallback rather than silently generating empty notes.
He also insisted no phased rollout:
please dont do a phased rollout over time. we need to do it all now