Passing Grades to SIS (Banner)

Robbie_Grant
Community Champion

Back in January, we were given a project to pass grades from Canvas into Banner.  Now, when I say pass grades, what I really mean is give faculty the ability to pull grades from their Canvas course into the grades area of Banner self service.  What this entails is the enabling of a grading scheme in the course and then getting the data over from Canvas into Banner.

So, how did we decide to pull this off?  First we needed to engage Canvas Professional Services to complete the Grading Scheme API.  Once that was complete (we are still testing this) our excellent Banner expert, Enrique Cardenas, created a button on the Banner self serve page that when click, does the following:

  1. It first checks to see if there is a grading scheme enabled in the course that was selected in Banner Self Service.
  2. If a grading scheme is found, it pulls the grades to the self service page using the scheme found in the course.  If a grading scheme is not found, the grading scheme API is triggered, checking the Enable grading scheme check box and then setting the default grading scheme (A, B, C, D, F) that we created at the institution level in Canvas.  The grades are then pulled from the course into the self service page.
  3. As the grades are pulled, each student's record changes color in self service to indicate a valid grade (green), a non-passing grade (orange-red) which requires a last date of attendance and a non-valid grade (yellow) or student that appears in self service but not in Canvas (due to a with drawl).

Originally we had planned to use CAS to due the grade exchange, but there have been some issues that have prevented this from happening.  We have been testing this process now for the past few days and it seems to be working perfectly.  The first grade pull will happen at the end of our Summer session starting on July 31st.

To add to this, we will also be enabling the default grading scheme in all Canvas courses (8500+) in the fall semester using the Grading Scheme API.  Once we load all of our courses from our Banner SIS on August 1st, a program will kick off that will check the Enable grading scheme box and set the grading scheme to the one created at the institution level using the grading scheme API.


Robbie