SIS/ClassLink Integration

[PATRICKOBRIEN1]

We have PowerSchool eSchool for our SIS.  We also use the OneRoster standard with ClassLink for rostering applications.  Can you offer an opinion on a preferred way to integrate with Canvas.  A few things we would like:

Ease of use

Notifications of success/Failure

Timely integration (We have had experiences with it taking a long time)

If anyone can offer insights that would be great!

Thank you,

Patrick

[melodyc_lam]

@PATRICKOBRIEN1 We have a similar setup in my district (PowerSchool through our state and ClassLink for rostering) -- because our state sets up our SIS integrations with Canvas, I had to integrate with the SIS directly instead of rostering through ClassLink. To give a sense of how large my district is, we have close to 170,000 users of Canvas.

With rostering with the SIS (OneRoster):

Ease of Use -- it's automated. We have roster updates every night from the SIS.

Notifications of success/failure -- unfortunately, I don't think the integration supports email notifications, but I do spot check and it will let me know if it's failed or not. (I usually get support tickets letting me know if there's a problem, so I usually use that as my canary.) You can also re-run a scheduled roster send if it did fail (for example, if the SIS went offline).

Timely integration -- could you explain what you mean by 'timely integration'?

To add to this, with rostering with the SIS we do get grade passback, which means that teachers can send scores from Canvas to PowerSchool (one way sync) so it's a really great way of saving some time with grading.

Some considerations:

You can roster with the SIS and have Classlink as your SSO. We have this setup, it's just a matter of making sure that the "login" field of a user is the same login as ClassLink. (We also have 2 more SSO methods, Google and our state SSO). It works extremely well for us and it's a good backup just in case one of the SSO methods goes down (which can happen!)

Hope this helps!

[PATRICKOBRIEN1]

melodyc_lam,

This is great.  Thank you for the information.  With regard to the timely integration, I would like it to happen in a reasonable amount of time.  We had integration with eSchool in the past and it tool 12 hours.  I was net here at that time so I can't speak to as why it was that way.  Currently, there are scripts that run on a SQL server and a job in Canvas that handles the integration.  

We support eSchool as our SIS (11,000) students and ClassLink for SSO (not Canvas at the moment).  Ultimately my goal is to get a seamless integration that is easier to manage.

Thanks again for your advice.  Have a great weekend!!!

Thank you,

Patrick O'Brien

Systems Analyst

Council Rock School District

215-944-1069

[melodyc_lam]

@PATRICKOBRIEN1 Just to give you a gauge of our direct SIS integration and how long it takes, for our district we do an overnight sync from around 10pm to 5AM. We have 8 rosters + two extra feeds for district office and to enroll students into required courses at our district.

The length of time it takes for a push depends on how much data you're sending -- at the beginning of the year and during a semester change are our heavier feeds, so those take longer, but for the most part during the year it's pretty seamless.