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Are there any Brightspace schools who have interfaced with Populi as their SIS?

Bill.T.130

Populi has its own integrated LMS, but we are moving to Brightspace to enable outcome-based classes and other features not supported by Populi. We are interested in the possibility of keeping Populi as our SIS only and would like to discuss with any other schools who have interfaced the two systems.

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Janet.O.779

Hi, @Bill.T.130. We're a small school in Alberta with Populi as our SIS. We started using Brightspace for our campus courses around 2020, but we haven't formally integrated the two systems.

In 2021, we had a discussion with another school using Populi and Brightspace. They contracted a private developer to build them an API to create course shells, sync rosters and final grades. They seemed happy with the results.

We have some unique things going on in Populi and we also weren't satisfied with just final grades—we wanted to bring granular grades over too—so we've just handled things manually and/or semi-manually… using csv file exports from one system, editing them, then importing into the other system.

As of this summer, though, we've brought on an additional IT staff member who has experience in API development. He will be exploring what we might do in the future.

Meanwhile, some of our faculty have used a formalized csv editing process I developed to assist with transferring grades from Brightspace to Populi at the end of each term. We've found it worth the bother for large classes with many grade items, but for small classes with few assignments our faculty or TAs tend to just manually transcribe grades from screen to screen rather than fiddling with a file. Not everyone is that techy/detail-oriented. 😉

Bill.T.130

Thank you, @Miguel.B.106

All comments

Janet.O.779

Hi, @Bill.T.130. We're a small school in Alberta with Populi as our SIS. We started using Brightspace for our campus courses around 2020, but we haven't formally integrated the two systems.

Bill.T.130

Hi @Janet.O.779,

Many thanks for responding to our question. Our use case is a bit different - we only intend to bring final course grades back down to Populi. Assignment scores and other details will remain in Brightspace.

How are you handling the course registration side? Are you using the API so that Populi is the system of record for course registrations, add/drops, etc.?

As an FYI, Populi recently published a KB article on Brightspace integration using their APIs. We are analyzing this now and plan to meet with our Brightspace project team to confirm it will meet our needs. I'll post an update when we have more information.

Populi KB Article on Brightspace Integration.pdf

Miguel.B.1144

Hi @Bill.T.130,

Thank you for reaching out to the Brightspace Community!.

Regarding enrollments/unenrollments, it is worth exploring whether Populi can just dump daily files out, that can be transformed and ingested based on Brightspace Standard SIS integration format (D2L Standard CSV).

Please kindly find below some documentation related to the D2L Standard CSV - SIS integrations:

https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/23822-about-d2l-standard-csv

https://community.d2l.com/brightspace/kb/articles/1213

Hope this helps!

Please feel welcome to reach out with more questions.

Best regards

Miguel B.

Bill.T.130

Thank you, @Miguel.B.106

Janet.O.779

Hi, @Bill.T.130. Yes, I saw the Populi KB article. It would be wonderful to use it for syncing enrollments, but we're hindered in doing that by a number of factors, mainly differences between how we do things in each system and the timings etc., as well as our propensity for making exceptions to policies.

We do hope/plan to automate some of our processes in the future for greater efficiency, but it will take time and much "meeting of the minds" between our different system admins, policy-makers, and faculty to bring that about.

In the meantime, I just do things manually. I export csv files of course enrollments from Populi just before each semester, edit those, and import into Brightspace via Bulk User Management. During the add/drop period, I run reports of enrollment status changes daily and make the corresponding adjustments in Brightspace. After the end of that period, the Registrar takes over making any needed enrollment adjustments that come up during the remainder of the semester. If we were a larger school, this manual approach wouldn't be realistic/feasible.

I'm familiar with the resources Miguel linked. Perhaps over the next year or so, IT will help us arrange daily file dumping from Populi and the scripts necessary to make them digestible to Brightspace.

I'll be interested to read your update of what your project team concludes and how things go for you.

Bill.T.130

Hi @Janet.O.779,

Thanks for the additional info about your situation. I will post an update after we finish our prototyping of the API integration. According to the documentation, it should meet our needs. I'll include details of what we're sending/receiving, the frequency, special circumstances/exceptions, etc.

I agree the Brightspace CSV upload is a powerful tool, and we may need it if we run into scenarios that the API can't handle.