[ARCHIVED] Canvas integratin with Scantron's Class Climate

[mzucal]

Has anyone successfully integrated the survey tool Class Climate with Canvas? We are just starting this process.

[kmeeusen · Accepted solution]

Hello  @mzucal  :

I just found your inquiry. We are getting ready to start delivering Class Climate surveys via Canvas for our Fall end-of-quarter course evaluations. A very frustrating process to be sure. Before you read the rest of my tirade, know that our college admin purchased this system without consulting with eLearning.

The purported Class Climate integration is not really an integration at all, and is really just a tool for making a participant link available in every course. Unfortunately, it is not really "available" until someone manually adds it as an external tool into a module in every course. We have contracted with Instructure's Professional Services folks to push out a ready-made module with the participant link to all of our courses (at an additional expense). Another weakness of this integration is that it requires the compilation of data from our student information system to then be manually uploaded into Canvas via a CSV upload.  Almost all of the data uploaded could easily be obtained from within Canvas. We are also hampered by Class Climate's use of student and instructor email address as primary identifiers, instead of our unique student identification numbers. Users in Canvas are able to add their own email addresses and make them the default, which makes Class Climate's use of email very problematic.

There are only two of us in our office, and Class climate has owned our lives for more than a month trying to get everything figured out.

We are part of a state system of 34 community and technical college, and only one other college is using Class Climate, and they are primarily using the manual paper delivery of course evaluations which are then scanned into Class Climate.

Bottom line, you have my sympathy and if there is any way we can help we are there for you.

[rshaw1]

Does anybody have more up to date info on Class Climate integration than what is outlined here? Has anything changed in the configuration/integration over the past six month?

[kmeeusen]

Hi Richard:

In March Class Climate updated to version 7, and it included some good changes including a student and faculty dashboard, and the ability to have the participant links show up in Course Navigation. Still way too much manual work in the background, but some improvment.

One continuing problem is that Class Climate cannot work with gMail, and all our student email accounts are in gMail, so the reminder emails cannot go out from CC, and we have to manually take care of that.

I would gladly switch vendors in a heartbeat!

I hope this helps,

KLM

[rshaw1]

Kelley,

Are your student gmail accounts sent to gmail.com addresses or specific to your cptc.edu domain? our's auto provision to an @avc.edu address, and or do you know if that would make a difference?

[kmeeusen]

Richard:

Our student emails have the .edu suffix, but are managed through a Google server as gmail. The Google server and Class Climate refuse to talk to each other.

KLM

[rshaw1]

something to add to our list of issues to overcome - if/when we do, I'll share back to this thread - thank you Kelley

[tdelillo]

 @kmeeusen ​ - What does the background work entail? Scantron has been pushing us to revisit the Canvas integration since we upgraded, but I have close to zero programmer support right now. What is your opinion of the workload?

[rshaw1]

Kona,

Our integration didn’t require any programmer time. One of my systems admins made the config changes to canvas, by importing the xml.

I’m pasting his comments below. I believe the Gmail issue that was reported in this stream may be because they’re not running their own internal mail relay/service. We are also a Gmail campus, but all our internal services who have email capacity relays out through our internal server.

I hope you find this of use.

Information on building xml app follows - Rick

Figured out how to get Class Climate integrated with Canvas. We needed to make an XML import to describe the service, including where we wanted it to appear for user access. Attached is the link I used to make the file and a copy of the XML I used. I have added myself and Geary to the Canvas Training shell and the link appears to be working correctly.

Mike

https://www.edu-apps.org/build_xml.html

xml for paste into app

[kmeeusen]

Hi  @tdelillo ​

The biggest background work is uploading flat files from our student information system (SIS) with student IDs, course IDs, Instructor IDs etc before each survey. Cleaning up those reports, because there are always errors - which means tediously going through the thousands of listings by hand, then tediously rechecking in Class Climate to make sure they are correct at that end and we didn't miss anything. If there are any errors in the flat files, and there will be I promise, then the surveys don't work correctly for those error selection. And don't let J.P. (integration manager) hand you the typical used-car-salesman routine that this isn't a problem, and isn't a lot of work.

A true integration would be able to capture all that data from Canvas.

KLM

[tdelillo]

Thank you  @kmeeusen ​! This is exactly the kind of feedback I needed. We are actually planning to move to a different survey tool within the next year, so I was only going to pursue the Class Climate integration if it could be done relatively easily. Sounds like that's still a big "no".