There is a new integration between Banner and Blackboard.  We undertook changing the integration to improve the experience for faculty and students by providing real-time updates to enrollments and faculty 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 that are scheduled. 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.

UPDATE: We’ve discovered that the letter grades pulled into the Banner Grade submit tool are based on the schema assigned to the column. Make sure that WIT Undergrad or WIT Graduate letter schema is selected for either primary or secondary grade display for the external grade column. If no schema is selected, the system seems to default to the Letter schema which does not reflect the schemas used here at Wentworth.

A few bumps in the road…As many users noted, drops from courses at the beginning of the summer semester did not occur as rapidly as they were processed in the old system. Our hope, base on experience in a test system, was that real-time processing would catch all the adds and drops once we added all the courses to the system and keep the enrollments up to date as changes were made. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. DTS staff from the Enterprise Applications group worked with technical staff from our vendor, Ellucian, to troubleshoot and correct the problem. We now believe that all enrollments should be up to date.

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.