Leveling Up Canvas Imports in Sakai Lessons

Sakai’s Lessons tool just took a major leap forward in welcoming content from the Canvas ecosystem. In SAK-51805, committed on September 2, 2025, we rewired the Common Cartridge import pipeline to recognize Canvas-flavored QTI assessments immediately—no more dumping them into a generic content bucket and hoping the questions land somewhere useful. A new CCQTITranslator now intercepts .qti, .xml, and .xml.qti files, parses them securely, and hands Samigo a fully formed assessment object with version detection, title extraction, and description metadata intact.

Recognizing Canvas QTI from the Start

Getting this right required tightening every link in the chain. We upgraded the Common Cartridge parser to register the translator before the generic handlers, shored up namespace utilities, and expanded the Lessons assignment service so point values, due dates, and submission types survive the trip. The import flow now validates resource types as they arrive, reducing the need for manual cleanup and keeping instructor expectations aligned with the final result.

Guardrails for Complex Courses

Canvas courses often arrive packed with nuanced question banks and linked resources, so we built guardrails to normalize context paths, keep titles user-friendly, and warn on anything suspicious (like path traversal attempts inside the archive). When the import can’t recover gracefully, Sakai now logs actionable diagnostics so admins can fix the source package instead of guessing what went wrong. The net result is a smoother experience for instructors migrating rich course content into Lessons.

Regression Suite Confidence

Finally, we wrapped the change in a full set of regression tests. The new suite exercises everything from vanilla multiple-choice banks to Canvas’s assignment attachments, proving that what works today will keep working as Lessons evolves. These upgrades are already available in Sakai’s 25.x branch, so institutions can start benefiting right away. For instructors migrating from Canvas, the result is simple: upload the cartridge, click import, and watch Lessons lay out assessments, resources, and assignments exactly as expected.