06-The Banner/Canvas Integration
Last updated by neal.legler 4 years agoThe Banner/Canvas Integration
It may seem a bit strange to talk about the Canvas and Banner integration this early, but knowing about it up front makes finding courses and user accounts easier.
Canvas is called a Learning Management System, or LMS , because it has tools that help teachers manage the learning process. Banner, the website where you register for classes, see your class schedule, and more, is called a Student Information System, or SIS . It is also considered the system of record for all student, teacher, and class information at USU, meaning it contains the official record of any enrollments, grades, etc.
Banner and Canvas are integrated, meaning they can share information and send updates to each other. This is made possible by software (the Ellucian Intelligent Learning Platform, or ILP) that sends information between the two systems .
For example, when a student adds a class in Banner, that new enrollment gets added to a list of recent Banner changes called the Banner queue. ILP keeps track of changes that are added to the queue and starts processing them by encoding them into small code snippets that it sends to Canvas. We refer to these as live event updates . In our example, Canvas receives the live event code snippet that indicates a student added a class. Canvas reads the IDs of the student and the course section, finds the matching user and section IDs in its own database, and adds the student to the section.
Canvas can also send grade updates to Banner. At the end of the semester, it is common for teachers to use a feature that sends the list of grades from their Canvas course to Banner via ILP. This is called grade passback.
Key points:
Only the lead Canvas admins manage the integration, but it helps to understand these basic principles:
Courses, course settings, enrollments, and user accounts come from Banner. The information for each semester (also called term ) is usually added in bulk for the first time by the Canvas admin shortly before course registration begins. The admin then enables live events for the term.
Updates in Banner sync to Canvas “live.” Once live events are enabled for a term, any changes to the term made in Banner (like new enrollments or courses) are reflected in Canvas. When the integration is flowing properly, updates happen within a minute or so.
The SIS ID in Canvas matches an item to its Banner counterpart. Canvas user accounts, courses, and sections that are synced with Banner have an SIS ID , which matches the ID of a corresponding item in Banner. This is usually the course registration number (CRN) in Banner, or if it’s a course containing crosslisted sections, the crosslist ID. A Canvas item with no SIS ID isn’t synced to anything in Banner.
Course content ultimately needs to go in the Banner-synced course. Sometimes faculty build their courses in what we call a “Build” course that is manually created and isn’t connected to Banner. Before their students can see the course content, they have to copy the content to their “live” course--the one that is synced to banner. Similarly, they need to copy the content to their most current course for their current students to see it.
Canvas changes to Banner-synced settings don’t “stick.” If a Canvas admin makes a manual change in Canvas, like changing a course start or end date, changing a student’s name, enrolling a student, or combining sections, a live event from Banner may arrive that reverses these changes. As a rule, Canvas settings that were made by Banner are frequently reset by Banner.
Sometimes the inte gration doesn’t work properly. Software integrations are complex. If there’s a problem with Banner, ILP, or Canvas, the Banner queue gets backed up and live events don’t flow. Sometimes events are saved in the Banner queue, and they process once one of the software components start behaving. Other times live events are lost, so the lead Canvas admin has to run batch imports that resync the systems.
