For those who cross list course sections, how do you deal with conflicts in the grade export with your SIS?

[rpsimon]

This is the first year that I allowed my teachers to cross list their course sections with parallel classes that they teach.  The course section number in the grade export at the account level is not matching the course section number in which they are enrolled in our SIS.  I upload the grades to our SIS portals on a weekly basis and it would take me more than an hour to review the data and edit it as necessary.  I am looking for creative ways to allow our teachers to continue cross listing their course sections AND prevent me from having to spend hours on end editing the data so it's accepted by our SIS.

I am curious what others have done and/or are doing because I cannot be the only one to experience this issue.  

I did contact Canvas Support and I was directed by L2 to reach out to my CSM about custom building the feature which I am sure will cost thousands of dollars.  

Thanks, 

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @rpsimon,

In general if you're syncing back to an SIS and also allowing faculty to crosslist in Canvas, you'd want to make sure that your SIS is really only looking at what Canvas calls the section information, and not information about the course shell.  When a section is crosslisted, the section information (section sis_id specifically) will remain the same as when the section was in the original course shell so there would be no impact to an integration if this was all it was looking at (and normally this should be all that things need to look at, though that could vary).  Integrations that are coded to look at the course sis_id instead of or in addition to the section sis_id are likely going to be problematic for crosslisting in Canvas, and that's what it sounds like your current integration/processes are doing.

I hope this small but of info helps point you in a direction.  I'd definitely check with your SIS provider about options, as I feel like this is something they should be handline on their end and not something Instructure should need to code something to do, though again I'm speaking in generalities here and that's always a bit dangerous.

-Chris