What unique identifier do you use to link MIS classes to Google Classroom?

[David44]

Hi,

 

We are looking at creating a Google Classroom course for every class from our MIS (SIMS in our case). The actual process seems easy enough using Google's APIs but how are schools linking the two sets of data?

 

Classes in SIMS have an ID and courses in Google Classroom have an ID but they are each assigned by their respective systems. I can't write the Google Classroom ID back to SIMS and I can't (as far I know, correct me if I am wrong) write the SIMS classId to Google.

 

I did consider creating an AD group for each class and having both IDs stored in that but that seems quite a lot of overhead that I would like to avoid. My other thought was to have a CSV file acting as some kind of look up table to link the IDs.

 

Anyway, I'm opening to suggestions and would be interested in how others have already solved this problem.

 

Thanks.

David.

[edmokeski]

Have you looked at RosterSync by New Visions (free) or SalamandarSoft (not free)? May save you reinventing the wheel. I don't know what's inside Salamandar's black box, but it appears to rely on class alias in Classroom more than class ID. (alias is assignable, ID is auto-generated) RosterSync appears to construct an alias as well, out of some set fields exported from your MIS. e.g. we used to use class code concatenated with academic year (as class codes were not necessarily unique, but could be repeated across years) for RosterSync.

 

RosterSync (admin edition) works well, and it's hard to beat the price, but I don't think it's possible to automate it. Salamandar's solution runs as a scheduled task on our servers and synchronises things overnight. (Mind you, we use a different MIS, but most vendors make sure their products work first w/ SIMS, the 800-pound gorilla of MISes).

[RLR]

We're using Salamander also to create Google Classrooms. It can run daily to keep classes up-to-date but we find staff may want to edit their classes slightly so run it at the beginning of the year and then leave it.