Configuration Options: Provisioning and Synchronizing Course Data

Configuration Options: Provisioning and Synchronizing Course Data

Synopsis

Courses must be created in Concourse before related syllabi can be populated and users can be given access.  If Course Files and Curriculum Vitae are enabled in your system, Files and CVs display in relation to the course. Users are registered to courses, not to syllabi. Concourse must have specific data to create a course, including:
  1. Course identifier (when created via automation)
  2. Course title
  3. Campus, Department
  4. Start date, end date
  5. Section (when created manually)
  6. Whether the course is structured, a template, or hidden from search (when created via automation)
This information can be transferred to Concourse in a variety of ways. Your institution can choose to create courses with a Course Feed, Auto-create courses, or create courses manually (for exceptional cases). Continue reading for more information to help you choose the right option for your institution.

Key Terms

  1. Course: the artifact in Concourse that contains the syllabus.
  2. Feed: a data file that is used to migrate information from external systems to Concourse; feeds can be automated or processed manually.
  3. Integration: the way in which Concourse is connected to your institution’s LMS or SSO.
  4. Auto-create: an optional component included in LMS integration that creates Concourse user accounts, registrations, and courses automatically with data from the LMS.
  5. Middleware: a tool that translates data in your institution’s systems to a format that Concourse can consume. Concourse’s middleware partner is Apidapter.
  6. Registration: the act of adding a user to a course and providing them with the appropriate group permissions based on their role in the course.
  7. Group Permissions: a setting that determines how each of seven user groups engages with each syllabus item; group permissions function at the syllabus level but can be set in a number of ways.
  8. End users: typically students, instructors, and other syllabus managers. End users typically engage with syllabi individually and do not need large-scale access to system data for management or reporting purposes.

Important to this Decision

Before making decisions about how your institution uses Concourse, you should consider how stakeholders, systems, timelines, and other factors are impacted. Review the important elements below to be better prepared to make changes to your Concourse configuration or implementation.
Key Players
Prior to making this decision, you should consult your institution’s SIS and LMS admins, as well as IT staff involved with data management.
Consideration
Courses must be created in your Concourse environment using data consistent with your other systems in order to match end users to their correct courses and syllabi. How course data is provisioned into Concourse should be the way that will result in the most consistent, accurate data transfer between your institution’s systems and Concourse.
Timing
This decision is typically made during the implementation phase, but course creation and synchronization can be changed afterward if your institution’s needs change.
Connected Systems & Locations
  1. If your institution processes Course Feeds:
    1. Data is queried from the SIS to generate Course Feeds. Many system admins use SQL to collect the data and generate feed files.
    2. Feeds can be processed manually by uploading a correctly-formatted .txt file to Concourse; feeds can also be automated with the use of tools like PowerShell.
  2. If your institution Auto-creates courses:
    1. A component is added to your middleware adapter to trigger the automatic creation of courses.
    2. Your LMS sends course data to Apidapter, where it is prepared for transmission to Concourse. If the course does not yet exist in your system, Concourse creates it; if the course does exist in your system, the user is matched to the existing course.
  3. If your institution creates courses manually, the System Admin assigns Create Course system permission to designated high-level users who create courses according to your institution’s timeline and workflow.
Method
  1. Course Feeds can be automated or processed manually. To learn more about automated feeds, see our knowledge base article on Automated Feed Processing. Course feeds can be generated manually using the data guidelines in Construct and Process System Data Feeds. To manually process a Course Feed: 
    1. Admin > Tools 
    2. Feed Processing 
    3. Select Course in the Type dropdown menu 
    4. Select File > Select the feed file from your device
    5. Process
  2. To Auto-Create courses, submit a request to support@campusconcourse.com to initiate the process. A member of Team Concourse will work with you to review data formatting in your other systems and set up meetings to implement and test the Auto-create course components in your middleware adapter.
  3. To manually create one course at a time:
    1. Select Create in the main navigation menu.
    2. Select Structured Course / Upload-Only Course, or Clone Course (to create a linked template or copy an existing course)
    3. If cloning a course, search for the course to clone in the Advanced Search block. In the search results, select Clone to the left of the course you would like to clone.
    4. Enter all course data requested in the Required Information block.
    5. Select Create.
Motivation & Impact
Choose the method that best supports your other systems, processes, and staff. Some options for course data provisioning will be more efficient than others, and some may not be feasible given your institutional contexts. For example, institutions that do not use an LMS are not able to Auto-create courses via an LTI integration and should therefore process Course Feeds. Likewise, institutions that have small, overburdened IT teams may not be able to manage additional feed processing, so Auto-create is likely the better option.

Configuration Options

Concourse provides different options for creating courses to support different institutional contexts. We recommend that you review these options carefully before deciding which one best meets your needs. 
  1. Option A: Process Course Feeds 
  2. Option B: Auto-create Courses
  3. Option C: Manually Create Courses
For the purposes of creating and synchronizing large amounts of course data, either creating courses via feed or auto-creating courses is the best option for quickly and accurately creating courses that match data in your other systems. It is not recommended to use both Auto-Create and Course Feeds because it results in redundant effort and can lead to duplicated courses (or access errors) if a discrepancy exists in course data across multiple sources. If the choices below don’t fit your needs, reach out to Client Services for assistance.
Option A: Process Course Feeds
  1. Approach: For automated feed processing, a member of your institution’s IT staff writes a generation script (SQL is often used for this purpose) to create Course Feed files from data in your Student Information System; the Course Feed is then transmitted to Concourse via POST over HTTPS. Once feeds are confirmed to create courses as expected, this process can be automated with PowerShell or other job scheduling software. Feed files can be created manually, but this approach opens up the possibility of errors in data being fed into Concourse, which could result in system data errors. If your institution generates feed files automatically, those files can be manually processed in Concourse at a cadence that fits your needs. Once courses and users have been created in Concourse, registrations can be created to allow users access and group permissions for the appropriate courses. Note that if your institution processes Course Feeds, you should also process Section Feeds.
  2. Better For: This option is by far the most popular among Concourse institutions. It is used by institutions whose IT teams can support the generation and processing of feeds. Automated feeds can be processed as frequently as you wish, which is especially helpful for institutions that add and modify many course sections during the drop/add period of each term.
  3. Advantages and Disadvantages of Registration Feeds: Automated Course Feeds require little long-term maintenance and intervention after the initial setup and troubleshooting period; however, if feeds are not processed in the correct sequence or at the correct frequency, there may be errors that delay in syllabus creation and access. 
  4. Effort: After the initial development process, using Course Feeds requires little manual intervention. It is a good idea to review feed generation and formatting practices as part of regular system maintenance to ensure that courses are being created as expected. We recommend that feed files be generated and processed manually at first to ensure accuracy of data.
Option B: Auto-create Courses
  1. Approach: Submit a request to your implementation team or support@campusconcourse.com to initiate the process of adding Auto-create course components to the middleware adapter for your LMS integration. A conversation will follow to confirm your institution’s use case and other related configuration settings, and then Team Concourse will meet with you to set up and test the additions to your adapter. 
  2. Better For: This option is better for smaller institutions, institutions with less complex Concourse systems, or institutions whose IT staff does not have the bandwidth to support developing feeds. Because course auto-creation occurs via LMS access, It is used by institutions where end users will access Concourse exclusively via the LMS. 
  3. Advantages and Disadvantages of Auto-create: An advantage of this approach is that if your institution opts to auto-create users, courses, and registrations, there is no need to worry about errors related to feed sequencing. A disadvantage of this approach is potential delays in syllabus creation and access if instructors do not select the Concourse link in their LMS courses to create the course and syllabus in a timely manner; such a delay impacts students as well as reporters who need to collect course data through Concourse.  Another complication is that if course data in your LMS is not consistent or changes after your deployment, there can be interruptions to syllabus access until the course data format can be reviewed and the middleware adapter can be updated.
  4. Effort: The effort required to implement course auto-creation is dependent on the complexity and consistency of data in your LMS. Data that is formatted in a complex or inconsistent manner tends to need more intervention in Apidapter to translate the data into a format Concourse can consume; as a result, the process of developing and testing adapter components for course auto-creation can be more lengthy than a basic LMS integration. Once course auto-creation is implemented, no additional changes are required unless the format of course data changes in your LMS. If this occurs, an ad hoc meeting can be scheduled with Team Concourse to address.
Option C: Manually Create Courses
  1. Approach: Users with Create Courses system permissions are the only users who are able to create courses manually; even System Administrators are not able to create courses in Concourse if they do not have Create Courses permission. A user with this permission can create structured or unstructured courses depending on your system configuration. Most institutions employ this role for creating non-academic courses on an as-needed basis rather than for creating the majority of academic courses at the institution (e.g., pilot or training courses).  
  2. Better For: This option is typically used only for exceptional cases at a variety of institutions, when a limited number of courses must be created on demand or when creating the course via Course Feed it is not feasible. 
  3. Advantages and Disadvantages of Manually Creating Courses: Creating courses manually is not extremely time-consuming on the individual level for exceptional or outlier courses, but if more than a few courses must be created, this process is far less time efficient than Auto-Create or Course Feed. Another disadvantage is that manually creating courses opens up your system data to potential user error. If a manually created course is one where students should be registered but the data entered during course creation doesn’t match the data as it appears in the LMS, students may not be matched to the correct course and syllabus. For courses that do not yet exist in your SIS and therefore wouldn’t be included in Course Feeds, manually creating a course is the most efficient way to get the course into your Concourse System.
  4. Effort: The time investment for manually creating courses depends on the number of courses you are planning to create. Since courses are created one at a time, you can plan to spend approximately one to two minutes per course that will be created. While it is not arduous to manually create a few courses manually, trying to create dozens or hundreds of courses manually is far too time consuming to be effective. 

Post-Decision Changes

Your institution’s needs may change over time and you may need to make changes to your configuration settings. In other words, the configuration decisions you make during the implementation phase might not be as efficient five or ten years afterward. Review the guidance below to better understand how changing this particular decision may affect your Concourse system or deployment in the future.
Disabling Auto-create Functionality to Switch to Course Feeds
If your institution initially provisions courses via Auto-create and later decides to switch to processing Course Feeds, you will need to:
  1. Work with a member of your IT staff to implement feed generation and processing (automated if possible), including formatting and sequencing of feeds.
  2. Contact Concourse to request the Auto-create course component be removed from your middleware adapter. At this time, also request that your sandbox be refreshed.
  3. Test all new feeds in your sandbox prior to processing feeds in the production environment. Once you have confirmed that courses are being created via feeds as expected in the sandbox, process the feeds in your production environment.
Discontinuing Course Feeds to Enable Auto-create Functionality
If your institution initially provisions courses via Course Feed and later decides to switch to Auto-create courses, you will need to:
  1. Reach out to Concourse to initiate the process of updating your middleware adapter.
  2. Meet with Concourse to carefully review data transmissions from your LMS and strategize how your middleware adapter should be updated to Auto-create courses. 
  3. Set up testing with Team Concourse to confirm that courses are being created automatically as expected.
  4. Reach out to your IT staff to request that Course Feeds be discontinued.
  5. Inform instructors that if students attempt to access a syllabus before its course has been created, they will receive an error. Instructors should be encouraged to access their Concourse syllabi prior to expected student attempts and to communicate with students when the syllabus will be available.

Related Topics

Before making a decision about provisioning and synchronizing registration data, you should be familiar with some related issues and contexts. See the following articles for more information:
  1. Learn more about constructing Course Feeds in Construct and Process System Data Feeds.
  2. Get more information about Creating Syllabi from Course Templates.
  3. Find out more about Linked Course Templates and how their functionality impacts the course creation process.

Tell Us About Your Experience

Did this article answer your question? If you made a decision like this for your Concourse instance, let us know how it turned out. If we missed something in this article or if you have a question that isn’t addressed in our Knowledge Base, let us know how we can help by reaching out to support@campusconcourse.com. 

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