[ARCHIVED] Canvas and Clever and Infinite Campus Confusion

[rislis]

   Today was our first day back with teachers and our 2nd year of Canvas Implementation in grades 6-12. 

   Teachers still do not have their 2017-2018 Courses because of the finger pointing going on between Canvas, Clever and Infinite Campus. 

   Certainly other schools are in this situation. How do you handle terms in your SIS import? We talked to one school in our state that ditched Clever altogether and wrote their own script for Pete's sake!  We are resorting to an import with no terms defined (hopefully active for teachers tomorrow) and we may have to manually enter terms.  We've worked closely with our rep and Canvas support. They say their hands are tied. Clever support says it's the fault of Canvas. Infinite Campus is infinitely hard to work with when it comes to collaboration with Canvas.....especially grade passback, right?

   So, what gives? Why am I working a 16 hour day to ensure that my teachers can get into their classes in time for the first day of school with students?

 @baujac ‌ @meycod  @hanmat @

[Stef_retired]

Hi,  @rislis ‌, I've shared your question to https://community.canvaslms.com/community/answers/sis/k12-sis?sr=search&searchId=58b753d5-ba61-427d-...‌ and hope the increased visibility will get you some answers.

[rislis]

stefaniesanders Thank You!

[schachernp]

I hope you got everything working  @rislis ‌!

[jlewis7]

Hello,

Our school district is running a Canvas pilot at our two middle schools with a select group of teachers for the 2017-2018 school year, with the hope of going 3-12 next year (3rd - 12th grade are all 1:1). So far our biggest hang-up has been getting Clever to pull the correct fields from Infinite Campus in order to sync courses w/terms to Canvas. As this is a pilot, we are not under a specific timeline to get Canvas up and running, but we appear to have everything else in place.

One Question for Lisa, and perhaps some information to share:

Lisa, you say that you have resorted to importing courses w/o defined terms. Are your courses falling into Canvas' "Default Term"? If so, are you then modifying the default term to manually create terms? Also, do your students (in and out) still sync to Canvas w/o terms... more specifically will students still sync if the default term has been modified to manually create terms?

This is the closest I have gotten in terms of syncing terms to Canvas. We have not yet loaded these fields into Clever because we sync other systems via Clever, and the last time we loaded term fields into Clever, we had to pause all syncing, as our courses went blank.

What field path(s) have you tried to pull in Clever to sync terms to Canvas?

Thank you,

-Jeremy

[rislis]

Hi, Jeremy!

Yes, all of our courses fell into the Default Term. It is our intention to manually change terms to match our schedule. Our database manager has some ideas of how to do that in a batch, but it has been put on the back-burner since the end of the quarter seems so far away right now. LOL. 

More later .....have to get to a meeting.

[lpodraza]

Lisa,

I would love to connect with you. I am from Central Bucks School District in Pennsylvania with 18,000 students. I literally spent 2 months trying to get Campus-Clever-Canvas to work. I could have just written scripts for csv files. Our data is coming over for the most part okay - finally. Our Canvas integration team really stepped up in the end. The terms is the first marking period for everyone and I am hoping when the marking period changes it will udpate accordingly. We are missing Period data in Clever to be able to identify courses clearly and Section Number would be great. Teachers do not know what a SIS ID is. I have lists of One Roster issues to mention to Infinite Campus to correct. Our teachers would love grade passback but I don't think that will work just yet with this type of integration.

Laurel Podraza

267-893-20385

lpodraza@cbsd.org

[rislis]

Wow!  What an offer, Laurel.  What day/time works best for you? I'd like to include our database manager in this future meeting. Thank you very much! 

[lpodraza]

I am free the 19th and 22nd all day right now. Do those days work? I have mornings on the 18th and the 20th.

[tami_shaw]

We are experiencing similar frustrations with these three platforms and are spinning our wheels. If it's not too late, I would love to join your conference call this week or next.

[emily_liepe]

I would love to hear the call as well! And I'd love to hear if anyone has suggestions about assigning terms and any other ways to make IC-Clever-Canvas work more smoothly.

-Emily

[jlewis7]

Hello Again from Carson City, NV,

Our district is new to Canvas, and we are currently running a pilot at our two middle schools. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, we too were having issues getting Clever to pull the appropriate fields from Infinite Campus to correctly populate Canvas with terms. As of now, we are syncing Infinite Campus with Canvas via Clever and courses are coming over with terms, periods, students, etc. This did require Clever creating some custom mapping fields for us.

Custom Field Mappings in Clever:

• Term_name (Clever) to sectionSchedule_termStart (Infinite Campus)
• Term-start (Clever) to cal_startDate (Infinite Campus)
• Term_end (Clever) to cal_endDate (Infinite Campus)
• Name (Clever) to Course_name-Teacher.Last_name-Period (Infinite Campus)
• Teacher_id (Clever) to sectionInfo_staffNumber (Infinite Campus)

We were not able to sync courses with different start and end dates. For example, all courses are coming through with start and end dates that align to the fiscal year, so a Q1 course is falling into a term that runs from July 1 2017 to June 30 2018 in Canvas; however, we figure as long a teachers publish and unpublish courses at the start and end of the course, this wouldn't be a big deal. For those of you with more experience, I would love it if you might be able to identify any unforeseen consequences with this model - before we realize it for ourselves:) 

In addition, we have had some trouble with getting students logins and passwords set without using a student email. All students have a district assigned email; however, parents/students control their email fields in Infinite Campus, so using student emails wasn't going to work for us.

The Canvas Onboarding Team has been very helpful. They were able to pull the students' Student ID field from Clever for the student Login/email, and they were able to pull the students' birth date filed from Clever to set students' default passwords.

So far, so good...

Thanks,

-Jeremy

[rislis]

You are so kind, Jeremy!  Thank you for the time you have taken to share your experiences. I will share this with our Database manager and see if we can replicate your success. Followers to the thread - if it works, I'm wondering if we can have an online HAPPY HOUR and get to know each other. HAHAHA!

[lpodraza]

That is so interesting Jeremy. We were told by Clever that Campus does not pass the Period field over. Ours is blank. We did everything else you mentioned. We sent it as is and our teachers rename their classes and sections in Canvas. But, now I wonder why you are able to get Period in Clever from Campus. It never ends

We also mapped our student emails to our logins.

[jlewis7]

Laurel,

This is what it looks like on the teacher side:

We are not getting the period into Canvas from the Period Field, rather, we getting the period to populate via the "Name" field in Clever. This is a custom mapping field (See below)

• Name (Clever) to Course_name-Teacher.Last_name-Period (Infinite Campus)

You can see below that there is more to it than just a period... but it works:)

So, the "1" below in "1-1610" is the period and 1610 is the section number.

I hope this helps.

Disclaimer! - We are new to Canvas, and I am by no means an expert (more like a total novice fumbling my way). We are just doing the best we can. So far, this appears to be working...

Thanks,

-Jeremy

[lpodraza]

Yes; we had hoped to get it mapped that way but our Clever is blank for period. See below --

[jlewis7]

Laurel,

FYI... We are not getting the course period from Clever's "Period" field. We are getting it as part of Clever's Course "Name" field (See Below)

[lpodraza]

Did Clever do this for you? That's where I am getting confused. We asked Clever and they told us they could not customize this like you suggested although our Canvas integration team had thought Clever did in the past. I might ask Clever again why they cannot do this for us.

[rislis]

We got the same response as you, Laurel. Finger pointing between Clever and Canvas. We have found one school district that has had complete success with writing all of their own customized scripts. Another district is speaking with us on the 29th regarding their success with Clever and Canvas, so I will keep you all posted.

Thanks!

[MattHanes]

Our school district (31,000 students) went the independent route. We've been on Canvas for close to 3 years now. We pull everything directly from the Infinite Campus database to create the SIS import CSV files. The files get sent up every night to populate the changes in schedules. The benefit of doing it this way is that you have so much more flexibility in how to populate the sub-accounts and courses. With Infinite Campus making the bone-headed decision to start charging users next year for OneRoster, I don't think the grade passback part will ever happen. In my experience so far working with Infinite Campus, they have zero desire to help their districts get Canvas working because they would rather sell you their new "Campus Learning" LMS addon.

[rislis]

We COMPLETELY agree with you, Matt Hanes!  Our Canvas rep tells me that Canvas is working on the backside to offer us another grade passback option, You are a huge district compared to us, but would you be willing to share your ad hocs (or sql queries)  with us so we can try to make this work?

[MattHanes]

We don't mind at all of course but with so many different ways to setup Infinite Campus, I'm not sure how useful ours would be. I'll take a look at the queries today and see what might be universal enough to share.

[rislis]

Don't feel like you have to spend a ton of time doing this, Matt. i realize that there could be a ton of differences.

Thanks!

[hbradford]

Hi All!! Please see Clever's recent Blog Post for some really great updated information. Thanks!!