SIS Export Report - Am I understanding it correctly?

Jump to solution
gladysie
Community Contributor

We export SIS information from PeopleSoft into Canvas on a nightly basis.  At some point, the SIS system was failing to update enrollments as expected.  This left us with students enrolled in Canvas, but not officially through the SIS system.  I had thought I could determine which enrollments needed to be removed by using the SIS Export Report and comparing it against our SIS enrollments.  The SIS Export description reads - "SIS Export report: This report will export all the needed files for Users, Accounts, Terms, Courses, Sections, Enrollments, Groups, Group Memberships, and Cross Listings for an SIS import in their respective categories. This will only return items created or modified through SIS."  

I assumed this meant it would return records if SIS created a record and in the case of enrollments, not include enrollments added through +People.  In practice, this doesn't seem to be the case.  It seems if SIS Import created a user, it will include them in the report, even if added to a course through +People.  If a course was created through the Canvas web interface, but enrollments were handled through SIS Import, neither the course or the enrollments will appear in the report.  

So I guess the clarification I'm seeking is what does Canvas consider "created or modified" through SIS in the context of this report?  Enrollments don't seem to be "created".  I believe Users, Courses, Sections, Terms are considered "created".  It also seems there is a hierarchy to object creation, so if  a Course wasn't "created", then its enrollments won't appear even if all users were "created".   Are these the correct assumptions?

Stickiness doesn't apply to enrollments.  If it did, that would be an easy way to reconcile SIS vs Canvas.

Thanks in advance for any insights that can be provided!

Labels (2)
1 Solution
pklove
Community Champion

I haven't looked into it, but have you tried a Provisioning enrolments report?  It has a "created_by_sis" column.  This might just have the same problem, or it might not.  It could be worth a quick look.

View solution in original post