Setup guide for Grammarly Authorship in Canvas LMS

How does Grammarly Authorship work? 

Grammarly Authorship helps students show their writing is original by automatically labeling their text as written by them, created with AI, or edited with Grammarly. Grammarly Authorship is available through the Grammarly browser extension and Grammarly’s desktop app. 

Your privacy and security are a priority, so Grammarly Authorship is an opt-in feature that will not track text sources without your consent. Authorship stores all activity locally and shares data only when a user explicitly clicks “share report” and submits an assignment. 

When you install Grammarly Authorship for Canvas, your instructors will have a checkbox they can select on all new assignments that prompts students to turn on Authorship in their document editor of choice (we currently support Google Docs and Microsoft Word on Windows and Mac). When assignments with writing reports are submitted, the reports will automatically be associated with the assignments. Instructors can view all reports in a table for a single assignment to observe baseline trends or focus on the specific learning needs of particular students.

Steps to install Grammarly Authorship for Canvas LMS

To operate inside of Canvas, Grammarly Authorship needs the following things to be completed by a Canvas admin:

1. Install Canvas Data Services
2. Add a Live Event Data Stream to Data Services
3. Install the Grammarly Authorship App
4. (Optional) Create an Auth Token to support Microsoft Word .docx submissions
5. Install Grammarly LTI Enhancements JavaScript
6. Install Grammarly LTI Style CSS

Add a Live Event Data Stream to Canvas Data Services

First, follow Canvas’s official setup instructions. This step will enable our systems to capture and analyze student submissions and ensure this data stream receives all submissions across all courses. The first step in processing any submission is to verify that the assignment_id matches the assignment with the corresponding selected checkbox. To preserve student privacy, all assignments that are not explicitly selected will be discarded and not logged. Selected assignments will be processed immediately and stored on our secure servers, with the same permissions as the reports they are associated with. Only information that the student explicitly allows to be shared will be shared.

• Create a new Data Stream with the following configuration. To configure, use the following values:

  

Install the Grammarly Authorship App

1. In the Admin panel → Apps → Manage tab, click Install New App.

2. In the Dynamic Registration URL field, enter the following URL: https://authorship.grammarly.com/lti/canvas/install 

   

3. Click Connect to Grammarly: 

   

4. A tab will open; you may be prompted to log in. Next, you should see this message when the installation is complete:

   

5. Canvas will ask you to acknowledge the placement and permissions required by the application. Click Next on each of the four screens to complete the installation.

   

(Optional) Create an Auth Token to support Microsoft Word .docx submissions

For Grammarly Authorship to process Microsoft Word .docx files, it requires authorization permission from Canvas admins or instructors. After authorization, a read-only token is generated for the authorized user and used to call the Canvas API to submit data.

Canvas admin configuration

The following steps must be completed by a Canvas admin:

Go to Admin → Developer Keys → Inherited, and enable Grammarly Authorship API Key.

Enabling Authorship for assignments in Canvas for the first time

The following steps must be completed by an instructor:

1. Check the box next to Require Authorship Reports and click Authorize Grammarly Authorship.
   
2. On the next page, grant Grammarly Authorship access to your account by clicking Authorize.
   
3. Once completed, you will see a message saying “You successfully authorized Grammarly Authorship.”
   

Once you authorize Grammarly Authorship, the next time you enable the Authorship report for a new or existing assignment, you will see the message “You have already authorized Grammarly Authorship” and won’t need to authorize again.

Note: For existing assignments where Authorship was turned on but no one authorized it beforehand, you will still see the prompt to authorize it.

For existing users who previously provided an admin token, Authorship for Microsoft Word submissions will still work if the new approach hasn’t been implemented. However, we highly recommend switching to the new authorization process outlined above. Once authorization for the assignments is complete, please contact your Grammarly sales representative to delete the old admin-level token.

Install Grammarly Authorship External App

Grammarly Authorship will appear as a checkbox in the Edit Assignment page. This allows instructors to request Writing Reports from students for individual assignments.

1. In the Admin panel → Settings → Apps, click on the Manage tab, and then click View App Configurations
   
2. Click + App
   
3. In the Configuration Type dropdown, select By Client ID
   
4. Enter the Client ID that Canvas assigned to you in the previous step, then click Install.
   

Install Grammarly LTI Enhancements JavaScript

To fully integrate Grammarly Authorship into Canvas, we need to add some capabilities to your current installation. This is done by adding custom JavaScript and CSS to your theme. We provide a simple JavaScript bundle that loads our enhancements from our web servers dynamically (which is always in sync without the latest code we ship).

1. Go to Admin Panel → Themes and then click Open in Theme Editor for your current theme: 
   
2. Add the following JavaScript to your theme: https://authorship.grammarly.com/lti/static/canvas/lti-enhancements-embed.min.js

Install Grammarly LTI Style CSS

Canvas applies a common min-height: 450px to all external tools in the assignment_view placement. This makes it impossible to resize the external tool to match content that is smaller than 450px vertically. To address this issue, we provide the following CSS.

1. Go to Admin Panel → Themes. Then click Open in Theme Editor for your current theme: 
   
2. Add the following CSS to your theme: https://authorship.grammarly.com/lti/static/canvas/lti-enhancements.css

This CSS rule is applied to all external tools. As an alternative, we have implemented a custom LTI command called Grammarly:setStyle that allows our iframe to adjust its own style without affecting others.