Save Time by Importing GradesVerlyn Mol

Baldwin-Wallace Collegevmol@bw.edu

Session IT 4727

Baldwin-Wallace College

• Liberal Arts college by Cleveland, Ohio• 2950 undergrad day students• 1300 Adult and Graduate students• Blackboard Course Management Software

Reasons to Import Grades

• Grades were being sent to the Registrar for manual entry.

• President mandated electronic grading and use of Blackboard.

• Wanted to make transition as easy as possible for faculty; many were already recording grades in Blackboard. Did not want to make them re-enter grades in WebAdvisor.

Overview of process

• Course information from Colleague downloaded into CMS. B-W uses DOWNLOAD utility scheduled nightly by cron job.

• Grades entered into CMS. B-W has a module written by Blackboard to incorporate gradebook data.

• Grade information loaded from CMS into Colleague via ELF.

Course and Student Data Export

• Format will be determined by your CMS• Required fields will be Student ID, Course information.• We have some additional coding for our grading module.

Grade Import File FormatStudent ID Course IDs Stu Course Sec ID Grade Comments

Internal and External Course ID may not both be needed. Having internal may increase performance. Internal STUDENT.COURSE.SEC ID is not required, but we neededit for cross-listed courses, since we only use primary course ID?

ELFT Source File Specifications

ELFV Source File Specifications

ELFS Import Specifications

ELFM Import Specifications

Use INTER.STU.COURSE.SEC fields – it will also update STUDENT.ACAD.CRED.Defaults set for Credit Type, Status, CEU. Others set to null and it fills them in from the Course.

ELMD Default Assignment

Elf Import Procedure

STII to load data into intermediate files.

Elf Import Procedure

ITCI to load from Intermediate Files into Student Record.

Import Error Report

Error Report Resolution

Open import file and go to report line number to get course information. Excel will give you line numbers.

Cross-listed Courses

Cross-listed Courses

• At B-W, cross-listed courses all stored on CMS under primary course.

• Causes errors for UG/GR cross-listings if student does not have a program at that level.

• If there is a drop/add for the other level, be sure Student Course data is updated, or grade gets reported on the wrong course.

Questions?

Thanks for Attending!