Aug 2nd, 2017
Background
Student Information Systems (SIS) have the concept of a “Section” - a collection of one or more students taking the same course at the same time. The course is generally designated by a “Course ID” and often the Section is identified through a combination of the Course ID and a unique (within the school) Section suffix. For example a Section ID of “MAT7a” would mean a group of students (section “a”) taking “MAT7”).
Often a teacher will teach multiple “Sections” in the same physical class at the same time. In some cases quite a lot of them. One example where this arises frequently is with Co-op classes, where only one or two students are in each section (taking the same Course ID) yet the Co-op teacher is managing and reporting on 10 to 20 students in the same class. Another example of this might be a Special Education teacher teaching a number of different grade levels the same (or similar) set of Course IDs at the same time.
Some SIS platforms handle this case by supporting the concept of a “ClassID” that may be used in multiple Sections. Other SIS platforms handle this by simply enabling multiple Sections to be scheduled into the same room at the same time.
Regardless of SIS approach, by default in Edsby each separate section encountered in the SIS will result in a unique Edsby Class being created. In some cases this is desirable, but in many cases it can lead to a teacher having a large number of separate Edsby classes when in practice they would prefer to have all the students physically together in class also together in a single Edsby class.
This tech note describes how this kind of class consolidation can be achieved through some straightforward customizations of the Edsby – SIS integration logic. For this to be practical to implement there needs to be consistency across the set of schools in how your SIS is set up in this area. Please review this with Edsby Support.
Consolidation Keys
It is quite straightforward to consolidate ALL concurrent co-located sections into one Edsby class. However that is rarely desired, since in many cases (say an Advanced Math section and an Applied Math section being taught by the same teacher in the same class at the same time) the teacher needs a separate Edsby class due to different curriculum, different assessments, and so on. In order to identify and implement which sections should be consolidated the SIS integration logic can conditionally consolidate sections based on specified keys. These keys are generally some part of the CourseID/SectionID. Two examples are given below:
Co-op Class Consolidation Key: Let’s say a district has a convention that every Co-op class has a SectionID/ClassID that includes the string “coop” in it. The Edsby integration logic would then be adjusted to consolidate each concurrent collocated SectionID/ClassID with “coop” in the name into the same Edsby class.
Special Education Class Consolidation Key: Let’s say a district has a convention that every Special Education CourseID starts with the letter “K” and no other CourseID has a “K” as a prefix. Then a leading “K” can be used as the key for consolidating concurrent collocated special education classes.
Support for Co-op “Holding Tanks”
Some districts implement a concept of a “holding tank” for co-op students. In the first few weeks of a semester the group of students signed up for a co-op class at the same time with the same teacher don’t have unique sections yet in the SIS since they haven’t settled on which subject to take in Coop. So they initially start out in a Coop Holding Tank class where the teacher can take attendance, share updates with the students, assess the students, etc. Then, once the students have all chosen the particular course code they will be taking for their co-op session the SIS is updated to create sections to reflect this. The Edsby integration logic can be programmed up to consolidate all these sections into the existing Co-op holding tank in order to preserve information captured and shared to date, or the Edsby integration logic can be configured to set up a brand new Edsby class for the consolidated set of sections.
Preserving and Using the Original CourseID/SectionID
When Edsby does this type of integration-driven class consolidation it stores the original CourseID/SectionID of the original class for each student in the consolidated class. This is then displayed in useful places like the Attendance Sheet, the Report Card sheet, and in the Perspective to make it easy for the teacher to know the specific CourseID/SectionID that each student in the class is enrolled in.
Also, for the original CourseID/SectionID is used for structured class data submitted from the class. This includes attendance data and report card data. This ensures that the data uploaded to the SIS has the right CourseID/SectionID for each student.
Summary
Consolidating classes in Edsby via customizations to the SIS integration is a great way to reduce the number of Edsby classes a teacher sees and make it easier for the teacher to use Edsby effectively. This can be implemented via customizations to the integration logic for your SIS. However this details of how to do this are dependent on your use of the SIS.