Blackbaud Integration with Canvas Course Enrollment Sync

Helen Snyder

I'm wondering if anyone has integrated with Canvas (not talkinb about Grade pass back). We just did our intial data provisioning process and the one roster interface created a seperate course for each semester of a year long course. We were told this was because of the way blackbaud is set up. We are semester based curriculum, but some of our courses are year long (2 semesters) and some courses are only 1 semester. We don't want separate sections for each semester of a year long course - we want 1 section for the year.


Hope this makes sense - looking forward to connecting with someone that has faced this issue and resolved it.


Helen

Traci Holinger

Hi Helen - We have integrated with Canvas a year ago and that was a big conversation with our school, but in the other direction. We wanted to make sure all our yearlong classes were broken into two semester in Canvas. Our reason - because student grades are not cumulative, at the end of first semester, our students start fresh (if then ended English 1 - with a 75, they start fresh for Sem 2 with the chance to get a 95). However, since this may not be your case, you might want to consider having a Yearlong Academic Session in Blackbaud as the terms beginning and end dates creates Terms in Canvas.

Helen Snyder

Traci -

How do I have a yearlong term in BB - if I also have semester courses. I thought I couldn't have overlapping terms. If I can create a year long term in Bb - that would solve my problem.


Helen

Jonathan Gray

As far as I know, this is not possible. I would certainly check with tech support on the matter.


This has been an issue for our school, as well. We report grades cumulatively and have semester/year-long courses. There are some bandaid fixes to make them coexist, and this is how our system was setup for us in past years. The gist of the idea is all courses are programmed as length 1 and schedule sets are built around the courses. This of course breaks the scheduler, report cards, and transcript builder.

Helen Snyder

Jonathan -

Thanks for this info. So, does your school have all the courses set up a 1 term? How do you schedule? If not set up as 1 term - what other workarounds - bandaids - have you implemented.


Helen

Angie Addison

Hi Helen! last year we added the ability to configure your OneRoster integration to export only the lead section or all sections for a course depending on how you want the outcome to be on the Canvas side. That enhancement was in response to testing with Canvas and realizing they were creating a record for each section. In some cases schools want that, I believe to maintain different gradebooks, in others they may just want one. Hope this helps!