[SIS] Adding time zone to sis imports

[tshea1]

Problem statement:

There is currently no time zone column for course sis imports. Our courses are in different time zones. The default for our system is Pacific. If we want to import courses for the central time zone, we have to go into each course and update the time zone one at a time. We use the same blueprints across time zones so we cannot get them from there.

Proposed solution:

Please add a time zone column to the course SIS import. It would save the admins a lot of time. We import hundreds of courses throughout the year.

User role(s):

admin

[jpoulos]

Thanks for the submission @tshea1 !

Would it be possible to achieve your use case by leveraging course templates? Course templates allow you to specific course settings for any new course created in a sub-account. If you added a new layer of hierarchy into your sub-accounts, with one for each timezone, you'd be able to set up a course template with that timezone setting applied to any new course created in that sub-account.

For example, if your structure was

District/University Root Account
- College/School Sub-account

It could become:

District/University Root Account
- College/School Sub-account
-- Pacific Timezone courses
-- Mountain Timezone Courses

Without knowing the structure of your sub-accounts, however, I don't know if this would work for you.

The other alternative is using API scripting of the Course settings API to update the courses ad-hoc.

While the solution of adding it to the SIS Import flow is certainly worth exploring, I wonder if there is some interim solution here that will mitigate the pain of having to go into every course to adjust timezones.

Please let me know your thoughts on whether these solutions make sense!

[tshea1]

Thank you so much for responding. We are using blueprints.  For instance, say we have 50 courses we offer across the states. Each course has its own subaccount and blueprint. If we broke it down further by timezone, we'd need a separate blueprint for each of those, correct? We really don't want to combine different courses in the same subaccount. This is what we have right now...

• Root Account
  • Subaccount - Events
    • Subaccount - 2023 Summer Trainings
      • Subaccount - Math 1
        • Blueprint - Math 1
        • Course - Math 1 San Diego
        • Course - Math 1 San Antonio
      • Subaccount - Science
        • Blueprint - Science
        • Course - Science Tampa
        • Course - Science Denver

I hope that makes sense...I'm trying to avoid API calls in these cases.

•