If you were not on campus this summer you may have missed the announcements about the new way to submit grades from Blackboard to Banner. At the end of Spring semester Technology Services implemented a new integration between Banner and Blackboard.  We undertook the change to improve the experience for faculty and students by providing real-time updates to student enrollments and faculty course assignments as well as providing a means to send grades directly from Blackboard to Banner.

For faculty using Blackboard’s Grade Center this means a much simplified workflow eliminating the need to enter grades into Banner individually. For faculty not using Blackboard’s Grade Center, you can still avoid manually re-entering individual grades in Banner by uploading a file to Blackboard and using the new workflow to populate midterm and final grades with a few clicks sending an entire classes grades to Banner.

LIT will be holding drop-in sessions to assist faculty with setting up the Grade Center to send grades to Banner. As always, we will also meet with faculty individually for assistance with using Blackboard and visit any department meetings on request. For those that want to get a head start, we’ve prepared documentation to help you either set up your Grade Center or to use the Banner Grade submit tool . In addition, we’ve created a video to step you through the process.

Drop-in Sessions:
October 20, 7 -8 PM: GoToMeeting session
October 21, 9 AM – 2: PM Beatty 014
October 24, 9 AM – 4 PM: Williston 113 (Admissions Conference Room)
October 25, 9 AM – 3 PM: Beatty 014

 A few bumps in the road…We’ve discovered that the letter grades pulled into the Banner Grade submit tool are based on the available schema in the course (locate the schema by selecting Grading Schemas from the Manage menu in the Grade Center). The system looks for a schema named “Letter”. You may find a schema with this name in your course if content was copied from an earlier semester before the WIT Undergrad and WIT Grad schemas were implemented. The “Letter” schema represents the “out of the box” schema that ships with the product but which does not reflect the schemas used here at Wentworth (it has the highest grade as A+). We recommend deleting this original Letter schema. Next rename either the WIT Undergrad or WIT Graduate letter schema to “Letter”. Finally, select this new Letter schema as the primary display for the external grade column.

Some users have brought to our attention that some drops from courses did not process through to Blackboard. Technology Services staff from the Enterprise Applications group worked with technical staff from our vendor, Ellucian, to troubleshoot and correct the problem. We believe the real-time process is working correctly but some drops that occurred at the end of August may not have processed correctly.

IF you have any students not in Blackboard who should be or have students in Blackboard who have dropped, please open a ticket with the helpdesk so we can track down the cause and correct it.