Canvas Users: Dividing Content and Functionality with BBEM Academics

@John Burns

We've been doing this for a few years, and this year we got Canvas engineers to set up an automated pull of enrollments and courses from EMS Academics. Before that, I was uploading CSVs and having teachers help manage enrollments as they change.

The way we frame it is that EMS is the office (admissions, registration, forms, tuition) and Canvas is the classroom (grades and course communication). There's some grey area in the middle regarding campus-wide communication. We have a campus course in Canvas where each grade level is a section so our announcements go out through there. Portions of that course are public facing, so we can send incoming parents a link to it for information before they register with Canvas. We're communicating to incoming parents through official notes and push page up until the start of the school year, and then lean heavily on Canvas for their communication.

We tell parents they can check grades daily in Canvas, and we send an announcement halfway through each quarter reminding them of that, in lieu of a “progress report.” We do not do any grade passback; we have our teachers enter final grades in EMS for official report cards that parents can download from EMS if they want. The way you phrased it, “Use Blackbaud to take attendance and enter final grades, but use Canvas to record assignment grades" is exactly what we do. Teachers take attendance and enter final grades, but other than that don't use EMS. They're in Canvas all day every day.

Our students don't log into EMS at all, and our parents can only see a course list of their child's schedule.

I hope that helps!

@Marshall Chaney

Have you guys looked into the Canvas grade passback yet? We use Blackbaud and Canvas similar to you - class content is delivered through Canvas but Grading/Report Cards are done through Blackbaud, but we are also using the Blackbaud gradebook to log assignment marks. This means that teachers manually create assignments in Canvas, mark them, and then manually create the same assignment in Blackbaud and transcribe the grade there too.

I'm hoping to set up this fabled Canvas grade passback feature but they haven't been too detailed about how exactly that works. What assignment type(s) can be used? What about assessments/discussions? etc.

If you have any experience/info on this I would love to pick your brain!

@Todd DeSchuiteneer
Thanks for this! I actually saw that option in our Canvas integration settings already. I'm hoping to get some more detail on what teachers actually need to click on and set up when creating their Canvas gradebooks and assignments, and maybe an example of an assignment both in Canvas and in BBK so I can see what information comes across and what decisions have to be made on either end.

I think Canvas grade passback is relatively new so I'm having trouble finding Blackbaud users that also use Canvas.

@John Burns @Mike Kegler

We just went through the Canvas integration and are now using it to provision our Canvas class sites as well as use grade pass back to push Canvas grades to Blackbaud. I'm happy to share if you're still looking for info!