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Does your school use Clever? Can you share your experience?

Corrine Duncan

Is your school using Clever? Would you be willing to share your experience with using this application and how you use it at your school? It looks like it could be a good resource for our Lower School in particular with the ability to sign in with a badge (K-2?). Wondered how it works or if it works with Blackbaud as well? They do not show as one of the LMS platforms on Clever's site.

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Elizabeth Perron

Hi Corrine Duncan‍ ,

I noticed a peer has not answered your question.

I searched the Blackbaud Community and found this forum if you want to reply and ask if anyone has found any more answers.

In harmony and inclusion,

Elizabeth

Blackbaud Community Team

Maer BenYisrael

Hi, I'm trying to get Clever set up currently using the OneRoster sync method. This involves manually creating a OneRoster export (Core>SystemTools>OneRoster Export), then manually adjusting the CSV files to make things work....rather, "work".

I'm trying to get Badges working for K - 4 students as a first goal. Second goal is to use Clever to roster up See Saw. Badges seems attainable, but See Saw may be a bridge too far because of the amount of manual editing required.

Here are a number of things I have run into:

BB OneRoster export increments the manifest version by one each time you create a new export. For whatever reason, Clever requires the manifest version be 1.0 for every sync. So you have to manually edit the CSV in Excel and change the version number, and then format the Cell to Number with 1 decimal (1.0) otherwise Clever will choke on the sync.
BB's Oneroster export does not give grade levels to students in the users.csv. This is a crazy pain for badges because Clever filters out "badgable" students by grade level. Instead of assigning grade levels to students, I assigned grade levels to the sections in classes.csv. Clever support rep told me that when a section has a grade level assigned to it, the students in that section will get that grade level in their profile. I'm still testing this, but it's a reasonable way to approach the problem unless you have mixed aged classes.

It would be handy if there were some flexibility in K-12 to assign certain fields in K12 records to the fields in the OneRoster files. It seems to me at this point BB's OneRoster implementation is surface level and needs more dev.

Geoffrey Goodfellow

We are also newly implemented Clever this summer. I'm doing a similar thing as Maer, and it is a painful process. I'm using the .CSV upload process to Clever, and I'm using the OneRoster export files as starting points to get the data needed for the various .CSV files that Clever wants. Unfortuantely, they are in very different formats from one another and require significant editing. The work is significant enough that I don't plan to update Clever unless absolutely necessary to capture newly added students closer to when school starts.

In a perfect world, Celver would become OneRoster compliant so that we could just link it directly to Blackbaud without the need for files at all. However, until that time, I haven't found anything else.

The main reason that it is worth the effort to get Blackbaud data into Clever is that Clever then syncs and provides SSO to hundreds of other apps and products. I think we have about 4 different products that I was rostering all individually last year with different file formats and each wanting a different .CSV layout. Now, I go through all the painful work once to get the data correct in Clever, and everything else that connects to Clever rosters automatically. The fact that Clever is free is also good!

I talked to a Clever support rep who said that all their support people have been asking development for OneRoster compatibility because so many clients keep asking for it. Hopefully, it will happen at some point!

Bernadette Shilliam

We are giving up on the OneRoster option with Clever and Blackbaud. Despite Clever saying they use that format, we've been trying for a month to get the sync to work and they (Clever) keep coming back with more changes needed to the files, and now are saying we're missing a file called "categories". Doesn't sound very standardized. Going back to uploading the data to them with their .csv 'cause we have to get moving!

Andres Maruri

@Corrine Duncan

We implemented Clever this Summer in order to integrate with VHL Central for books and pre-populate rosters for out teachers. We haven't had the opportunity to use it more but I assume that will happen in the future. At the very least I wanted to write down the steps I go through to sync with Clever which may help you. Their support is great, although a little slow to start.

We integrate with Clever using OneRoster 1.1. After Clever sets up your platform internally to support this (important), You can use SFTP and submit the OneRoster zip file.

Changes to the OneRoster folder required to sync with Clever:

Clever requires a “demographics.csv" which isn't provided in the Blackbaud OneRoster zip. You can create a blank one with two columns ("sourcedID" and “birthDate”)
Your manifest.csv has to be changed since you added a demographics.csv. If you open up the manifest.csv change the row for demographics from ‘absent’ to ‘bulk’.
This is a wierd one: zip all the files into a new zip folder by selecting all the oneroster files, do not zip the folder contaning the files. I don't understand why this is necessary but it will not work otherwise (per Clever support).

Hope this helps!