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