Ellucian's ILP

[tabithao_lockle]

How many of you are using Ellucian's ILP? Do you find it useful? Are you using it to sync grades and SIS data?

[acompton]

We just saw a demo of this a week ago and I'd love to hear from any higher ed institutions who are using this as well. We have been waiting a long time for this product to be up-and-running for Canvas and would love for it to be working smoothly. Please share any experiences...good and bad, pros and cons. Ellucian ILP  #Ellucianilp‌

[tyler_clair]

We have been in talks with Ellucian since the announcement at Educause but we haven't jumped on it due to unanswered questions. We have had some confusion on how cross listing works, which is extremely vital to us, and we are still trying to get answers but it has been really difficult due to conflicting information supplied by both Ellucian and Instructure. For those that have seen demos can you confirm that cross listing functions the same way as LMB or is it different, or do the sections get crosslisted the same way as LMB in Canvas? Specifically if you cross list do you still get separate cross listed sections? 

For the most part it seems to be a vast improvement from LMB, but its a different paradigm since there are no files to download and batch upload anymore. The grade pass back LTI tool has really impressed our Registrars office, and it should cut down on grading mistakes being pushed to Banner. It also doesn't seem to be as flexible with naming conventions as other platform (Blackboard) integrations. That is something that we would have to prepare our users for rather than having it transparent to them. From the documentation you can definitely tell that the Blackboard and Moodle integrations of ILP are more mature and have more configuration options available. If you want to switch to ILP there are quite a few conventions that you are forced to conform to until they add customization options, so like I said in the beginning we are still on the fence.

ellucian‌ ilp #banner‌

[anthony_harris]

I would also love to hear from anyone who's using it.  We're just starting the implementation project with Ellucian, and I'd love to hear suggestions and anything anyone has found out that you wish you knew up front.

[mgudites]

We have ILP working. We're currently using it with Blackboard, going live with Canvas next month. It's definitely useful. Typically transactions sent from Colleague end up in Canvas in minutes, and it's working much better with the most recent update. We do plan on using the grade sync function (it's enabled, again just haven't used it yet because we don't go live until May).

[acompton]

 @mgudites  - Are you using cross-listed courses with the ILP in Canvas? In talking with a couple of other institutions, they've said that cross-listing isn't possible with ILP when using Canvas, so we've put the project on hold for now. Like  @tyler_clair , that is a big concern for us. I'll be eager to hear about your experience once you go live in May. From what we've gathered through talking to the few institutions using ILP and Canvas, this particular integration is still being fleshed out to some degree. We've also heard that they may have an update coming that will eliminate the need to go through Kimono and work directly with Canvas. Have you been told that?

[mgudites]

Hi Andrea,

1. The update that does away with the need for Kimono was officially released in production late last month (4.5.8). We are now Kimono free :smileycool:  ILP now does all of its communication directly through API calls.

2. If I recall correctly, the issue is that you can cross-list in Colleague and have all of the cross listed sections show up as one course in Canvas, but it won't break out the courses into separate Canvas sections within the course.

So for example, here's what a bunch of crosslisted courses sent over to Canvas looks like. You can see that it's four courses (it says ACG-2021 four times in the title), but when I go into Sections, it's all in ONE section.

[acompton]

Thanks,  @mgudites . I will pass this along to the team and we'll see if takes care of what we need. I appreciate the information and screen shot, and I still look forward to hearing how it goes when you're live next month. We would really like to hear that this is working!

[mgudites]

I probably should have stated, technically it is live...we've pushed all of our May sections already, including faculty enrollments. Student enrollments are waiting in our workflow queue, will be pushed out automatically in a couple of weeks. So, students aren't able to see or do anything just yet, but our courses are out there and faculty are in!

[acompton]

Sounds like so far so good. Here's hoping it continues!

[AmandaKelley]

@mgudites How has the grade pushing gone?  We are running Banner as well and in our initial testing we don't see the actual user pushing the grades but just  ILP_Admin.  We also had questions on if you use any controls on when grading is available (i.e. midterms weeks 4-7, finals week 14-16).  

I also want to echo the call for help for any schools currently using ILP.  We would love to get a call going for some q&a.

Thanks, Amanda

[tyler_clair]

Thanks Matt!

Andrea, we were finally able to pull the right people from Ellucian and Instructure together for a meeting and they went over how Banner integrates with Canvas and clarified many of our questions. My original question of cross listing was answered and for Banner, the cross listing combines each section under a parent cross list course as separate sections like we are used to and does not combine them like Colleague does. Not sure why they have different methodologies... I was also very excited that they were dropping the Kimono middleware.

So we are expecting our contract to be finalized around mid-May/June and that gives us the Summer and up until Spring courses are created in Banner for testing. We are planning on a Spring deployment and for about a month we will run LMB and ILP in tandem as we finish out Fall and start Spring. One thing that we have done is purchased a separate instance for testing so we can muck it up as much as we want and also compare what a provision term from ILP looks like compared to LMB. Our Banner team is excited as they will be able to do load testing prior to our priority registration.

[crodriguez3]

Tyler,

We're ready to take this on, and I have been in the background waiting for the latest move. We should be integrating this Summer for Fall 2020. I'm a bit confused about the crosslisting, is it not best practice to crosslist the course in Canvas when working with Ellucian, and, if not is it because of the grade push?  We definitely want to push grades, (in fact that is one of the major integration pieces that they are really looking forward to). We don't have many classes or instructors that crosslist, but there are a few and this will have to be worked out ahead of time it seems.

Also, with our old ERP we had to write a specific routine to ensure our students were concluded during the SIS uploads but it was never a really convenient process because the dropped students were still able to access content (conclude vs inactive). Does the ILP handle this more smoothly or do we have to write a separate script for those type of changes.

Like I said, I only have the documentation from Canvas at this point because I'm not in at the forefront of the Ellucian install, but I like to stay a step ahead of any changes for my faculty and student's sanity. If you have any suggestions or hints about what we should be aware of during the transition I would be grateful for anything at this point.

[scombs426]

Hi Tyler - I was wondering if I could reach out to you via email with a few questions regarding ILP?  I'm new to this and didn't see a way to access your personal email.  We're very new to this process and have a few questions.  Thanks much, Sharon

[lukeprather]

Sorry to dig up an older thread, but we're starting a project to set up ILP (SIS is Banner) and are curious if any other school(s) who've completed the ILP integration would be willing to visit (Zoom, phone, email etc.) about their experience? We're very early in the project and getting an idea what worked well, what issues you ran into and any advice you'd be willing share would be great. 

[khasson]

Did you get any responses?  We are looking for a solution for the canvas to banner as well.   How is it going so far?

[patfm]

Hi, All,

We just completed set up of Ethos and ILP 5 in our Banner Dev environment.  There were several issues that arose that we are now working on, some of them may not be issues for others.  We would be happy to do a Zoom session with other schools but we have a lot to learn as well.  We hope to have a Banner Test environment to do more testing in June, July.  We don't go to production till late fall for the Spring 2022 term.  We are doing a limited migration using our current SIS feed for this Fall's term. These are our issues:

1. We have a very specific course title convention that has served us for 15 years and we DON'T want to change it!!  Here is an example  SP22-MATH-10010-02  so we were told we need to use Ethos Extend to do this customization since it goes beyond what is available in vanilla ILP 5.  If you have an Ellucian support center account see:  https://resources.elluciancloud.com/bundle/ilpEthos_acn_configure_d_ethos/page/r_custom_course_token...
2. TA roles do not exist in Banner so our current SIS process to Sakai (which is the LMS we are migrating from) defines that role (anyone with less than a set % instructor assignment).  We might actually keep that process running after implementing ILP since there is no equivalent in ILP.  We are told that it is 'in the works' to do that. We plan to test this in our current DEV environment and see how well it plays with ILP.  Should work because after the initial batch ILP term load,  Canvas should still be able to take an SIS file and assign the TA role to the appropriate 'instructors' .
3. We also have our own homegrown SuperSection builder that we want to try with ILP.  It is better than the Canvas cross listing tool.  It allows instructors of record to combine sections that they want to manage in one course site.  These are not 'official' crosslists that come across from Banner like all other courses through ILP.  Since neither Banner nor ILP 'know' about them, they should continue to work in Canvas.  The theory is that since ILP is just updating the sections, it won't care about an external constructed site as long as the link back to Banner stays the same--the SIS ID of the sections.  Those super sections will come across to Canvas through an adapted SIS feed like in #2.
4. We ran through simple scenarios of sending a few courses with enrollments and instructors.  We also successfully sent grades back to Banner.  We need to continue testing the above  items and do more grade testing with our Registrar's office.

If you are interested in a Zoom session you can message  or email me.

[mwrightdb7]

@patfm 

I would like to setup a Zoom call with you and our team. We are looking to do the same. When would be a good time for you? We are a medical university in utilizing some of the same processes and are experiencing the same. 

[patfm]

@mwrightdb7 

We'd be glad to do a Zoom with you.  Send us some possible dates/times for next week.  I'll get back to you. Send info to my email: pmiller@nd.edu