SIS Import versus SIS Integration

[AliciaSwackhame]

Hi Everyone, 

What are the benefits of using SIS imports to create courses and do enrollment versus a SIS integration?

We are in the beginning stages of merging two instances of Canvas. At one location, they use SONIS as this SIS and have it integrated with Canvas. At the other location, we use SONIS as well, but we have the daily integration turned off.

We have to pull reports from SONIS and create SIS imports to create courses and enroll teachers and students. The benefits and hurdles to this are:

Benefit

- We have sub-accounts in Canvas and can control permissions to those subaccounts. When it's integrated, the permissions are not able to be dialed down.

Hurdle

- We have to run enrollments a few times to make sure everyone gets added.

- Students that drop have to be manually removed (not sure how this works when integrated)

I would love to get some input from the community weighing in on either side. 

Thanks,

Alicia

[dbrace]

Hi @AliciaSwackhame,

At my institution (a two-year community college), we use scheduled SIS imports and do not have an SIS integration.

The are three main reasons why we use SIS imports:

1. My department is the Department of Online Learning and I am the primary administrator for the LMS and we are separate from our IT Department (but work collaboratively with them). We also have a Dean and Instructional Designer that are LMS admins but that is primarily so that they have the ability to get into any course without any restrictions so that they can help anyone.
2. Before involving the LMS, our IT Department has various nightly tasks that are scheduled to run (after we are officially closed for business) and without those running it could/would (and does) lead to user accounts not being created in Canvas or enrollments from being successful because an username or email address (outside of Canvas) may not have been created yet. Even with that as a possibility and needing to go through error logs (especially before a semester starts and at the beginning of a semester), we do SIS imports during the day.
3. For my purposes as an archive based on designed processes with our IT Department, I like flat/CSV files so I can see how a course, user account, or enrollment was at a point-in-time. In Canvas from our SIS we update data four scheduled times (sometimes more often but manually) during each week day: 8 AM, 12 PM, 4 PM, and 8 PM. Those four times seem to be a reasonable balance.

I hope you find this information helpful as you make your decision.

-Doug