If course sections are cross listed, can I see the student's enrolled "child" course section number in the grade export at the account level?

[rpsimon]

I am my school's Canvas admin.  I allowed my teachers this year to use the cross listing as a feature in order to save them time.  However, when I run the grade export at the account level, the CSV grade export which is generated from Canvas is showing me the course number and section number for the parent course (columns D and F), and not the child course in if that is the actual enrolled course.  While the report does say the name of the actual course and (child) course section in which the student is enrolled (this is the data found in column G)  the data that I need to upload to my SIS is missing in the Column from column F.

The student is actually enrolled in Chemistry 10S section 1, which is course number 4007 section 01.  Because of the cross listing, this course became the child course and the student is now in the parent course 4007-02. 

Because 4007-01 is what is the on the student's schedule, that's the data that I need in my grade export. My SIS is rejecting the 4007-02 data.  

I know that the cross list section is a feature which many schools use.  How do you prevent this from becoming an issue?  

[stimme]

@rpsimon We do not use the grade export report at my institution, so I don't have direct experience with this. But when we implemented crosslisting via SIS Import, we started creating sections with SIS IDs in each course created by SIS import (we give the same SIS ID to the course and to the section, which makes sense because our SIS IDs basically represent sections). We started associating enrollments with sections in the SIS imports instead of courses. We can manage crosslistings via SIS imports, and we also allow manual crosslistings. I think this set of SIS relationships might be beneficial for you in the longer term.

In the shorter term, you might try running the Provisioning Report for Xlists for the relevant terms. This report includes the SIS ID of the course the sections were originally associated with (nonxlist_course_id). You could VLOOKUP those values based on the Canvas ID of sections in both spreadsheets. I hope it works.

[rpsimon]

@stimme I am trying to understand what you are saying, but for some reason it's going over my head. As a visual learner, I guess I need to see exactly what you are talking about.  🙂 
Our cross listings are not done via SIS import; rather I gave my teachers the permissions necessary (maybe it was editing sections - does that sound right?) that they needed to have in order to cross list their sections.  Many teachers teach parallel course sections (English 10-01, 10-02, 10-03, 10-04) and many do not (English 10-05, English 12-01, English 11-03).  Also, I am sure that those teachers who are not tech savvy probably didn't even have any remote interest in doing something "extra" - even though it's something that will save them time in the long run.

I know of 3 teachers offhand who decided to cross list their sections - at least this is what I believe to be the case - after a number of lines of my data from my CSV were rejected by our SIS because the course section numbers did not match what's on the students' schedules.  So if I have to manually change the course section numbers, I will do it (on a weekly basis) for THIS semester.  But I will be thinking long and hard before allowing cross listing for next semester.  I know that Google Classroom (which is NOT a full LMS) gives teachers the ability to post to multiple course sections at once; hence I thought I should finally allow my teachers to do it in Canvas.  I just never thought it would backfire on me.

HOWEVER, and this actually work to my advantage in the long run - and I might ask for your help with this if that's ok - our SIS is a homegrown SIS.  We have a computer programmer in my department.  Many of the features that were built into our SIS were done that way purposely to meet the needs of using Canvas which is the LMS we have been using for the past 10 years, and if I am correct, the only LMS that we have ever used.

My question going forward for you is that if I want my SIS admin (computer programmer on staff) to develop a way to allow uploads with cross listing course sections, what do I even need to ask for?  He can do practically anything; but I need to know exactly what to ask for.  

I actually reported this issue about a week ago (09/12) to Canvas Support and it was escalated to L2.  I contacted Canvas Support on 09/16 asking if there was an update to the case since I hadn't heard anything back after 4 days.  I was advised to contact my CSM and ask if the CSM could "poke" L2 and escalate the issue, which then I proceeded to do.  However, instead of nudging L2 and requesting the case to be escalated,  the CSM handed the case back to me, the Field Admin, which of course dropped it out of the L2 que.  I had to call Canvas Support again yesterday and tell the rep what happened and request it to be escalated again to L2.  Sigh.   

I would hate to take away this permission from my teachers after wanting to give it to them for years.  (My former principal a few years ago would not allow me to give this permission to teachers as he thought it would be too difficult for them, which is crazy.) Cross listing is very beneficial as I don't need to tell you.  

If you think you would be able to help me navigate this and you would be willing to contact me directly via email, phone, or virtually meet, I would definitely take you up on that offer.  

[chriscas]

Hi @rpsimon,

Very likely the request for your programmer would be to have whatever processes take the grade export from Canvas and input it into your sis look at the section data (probably column I) instead of the course data (column F).  When crosslisting, the section data *should* stay the same (at least it has in all scenarios where we do it here), and enrollments are always actually to a section so that would be the way to go.  I can't say for sure how your sis works, but in many cases, the section sis value is going to be very similar to the course sis.  If yours is completely different for some reason, that may be something that would need adjustment as well.

I hope this helps a bit!

-Chris

[rpsimon]

Hi @chriscas,

Thank you for your reply.  My SIS currently accepts the data as it would be enrolled course on the schedule, so that would be Course Number 4007 and Section Number 01.  I need to ask him if there's a way that he can program the ability for the SIS to accept a different section number.  

[stimme]

Hi @rpsimon ! Sorry it has been a couple weeks since my last reply. I hope that you have found a way to work around the issue crosslisting is causing with your grade export file. I put together a spreadsheet showing the suggestions in my previous post. It should be visible. There are some notes there.

I agree with @chriscas that one ask for your SIS programmer is to import scores by looking at column I (Section SIS ID), not column F (Course SIS ID), in the grade export file. My guess is that that column is blank right now. If it is blank, it means your SIS imports are not creating course sections explicitly. Implementing explicit section creation via SIS is also required to imports grades based on the student's Canvas section. The SIS Import examples in the spreadsheet use the required fields for the relevant CSVs. Here is the full SIS Import file guide.

[BrianLester]

If you are trying to sync with BlackBaud I've heard for another school that cross listing doesn't work with grade sync...

[rpsimon]

@BrianLester we do not use Blackbaud.  Rather our SIS is homegrown.  We have a computer programmer on staff which will hopefully work to my advantage here.  Just have to figure out exactly what needs to be done.