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

[AliciaSwackhame]

Doug,

Thank you for sharing. I appreciate the reasoning behind why you do that. Being able to see data like that has value, but running the manual upload 4 times a day seems like a lot. Is that mainly just during registration?

Thanks,

Alicia

[dbrace]

You are welcome, @AliciaSwackhame.

It is only technically a "manual" upload because the changes are not pushed from the API with a live process.  The uploaded are scheduled so they are not too much of a burden.

As far as if it is too often? No, at least not for us, because throughout our Fall and Spring semesters, we have sections of courses that are:

• the entire semester (14 weeks)
• 7 weeks (either the first-half or second-half)
• 10 weeks (either the first-ten weeks or last-ten weeks)
• 5 weeks

Because of that, students are regularly registering or withdrawing from or changing sections.

Before and while a semester is beginning, there are some students that wish our uploads would be more often until I explain the reasons why (and it involves other systems as well, such as inclusive access and other aspects of textbooks; something controlled by our IT Department and contracted Bookstore and textbook publishers).

-Doug

[chriscas]

Hi @AliciaSwackhame,

I was just going to chime in and say that the processes my institution uses are very similar to those outlined by @dbrace, though we have uploads scheduled every 3 hours from 9am-midnight (some of our systems reboot overnight, and there should be very little registration changes during that period anyways).  Our SIS is Ellucian Banner, and we build our scripted process before other solutions existed.  It honestly has worked out well because although it took time to write, our scripts are built around our policies and procedures, so we didn't have to try to fit any square pegs in round holes or anything.  Using a live API-based approach would have some benefit, but it's much more complex to custom code that, so we plan to keep our current processes for the foreseeable future.

-Chris