Blackboard clients can streamline their campus computing operations and provide better services to their constituents by unifying their administrative and e-Learning systems. The
Blackboard Learning System ™ supports a wide variety of capabilities for integration with any student information system. SCT is the leading provider of student information and other enterprise systems for Blackboard’s clients. Blackboard and SCT have partnered to enhance the integration options between their systems.
Blackboard has engaged with more than 50 clients to implement data integration with their SCT installations. By leveraging Blackboard’s standards-based system interfaces,
Blackboard can assist clients in integrating with all of the major SCT product lines: Banner, Plus, PowerCampus, Matrix and Luminis.
The most common type of integration between Blackboard and SCT concerns the transfer of enterprise data. Information about people, courses, organizations, and enrollments entered into the SCT system automatically propagates to the
Blackboard system. The process can even run in reverse; for instance, transferring grades from the Blackboard gradebook to the SCT gradebook. Blackboard and SCT accomplish this through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that conform to the IMS Enterprise Data Specification.
This process allows clients to manage all shared data in one place—whichever is the appropriate system for each type of data—resulting in time savings and improved data integrity across both systems.
Clients can take advantage of two data integration options:
• An “event-driven” process that implements real-time messaging between the systems to enable instantaneous updates every time information is added, changed or deleted.
• A “snapshot” process that implements an automated batch transfer of files on a schedule established by the client.
The event-driven scenario leverages SCT’s Luminis Data Integration Suite (LDIS), and provides tighter interoperability and greater convenience. The snapshot scenario is sufficient for institutions that are comfortable with daily data updates, and requires only that the client format a snapshot file for programmed transfer between the systems.
In addition, Blackboard and SCT can establish authentication integration between their systems. This enables a “single sign-on” scenario where users can move seamlessly between the systems after a single login. This provides an additional
• Babson College
• Baylor University
• Bucknell University
• California State University—Dominguez Hills
• Georgetown University
• Hofstra University
• Ivy Tech State College
• Lansing Community College
• Oregon State University
• University of Alaska—Anchorage
• University of South Florida
• University of Indianapolis
• University of Nebraska—Kearney
• University of Nebraska—Lincoln
• Worcester Polytechnic Institute level of convenience and enhances adoption of both the administrative and e-Learning online environments. Blackboard supports and has implemented a variety of authentication protocols for this purpose, including LDAP with SSL,
Kerberos, Radius and direct integration with the Luminis portal.
To complete the picture, Blackboard and SCT provide a broad range of technical planning, installation, integration and customization services that assist clients in implementing any or all of these solutions. These services draw on our consulting team’s extensive experience to help clients implement the technology quickly and optimally for their own specific needs.
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