Do you ever wonder how rostering, course setup and grade reporting data gets exchanged between your school’s Students Information System (SIS) and other learning tools? Unless there is a common data structure, it is very hard for data to flow from one system to another. That is why the OneRoster data exchange standards were created.
Schools that joined Atlas over the past year have benefitted from the ease of importing users and courses to Atlas, via OneRoster exports from their SIS and the Atlas integration tools. Our engineering team has been working hard to extend this capability to existing Atlas schools, where the SIS can export data using the OneRoster format. The goal is simple: to save you time – so that you have more hours to support members of your learning community.
What is OneRoster?
OneRoster is a set of data exchange standards that defines how rostering, course setup and grade reporting data is exchanged between Students Information Systems (SIS), Learning Platforms and Learning Tools. Your school SIS “provides” rostering data to Atlas, which works as the “consumer”.
Image from IMS Global
For more information, see:
https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/onerosterlis
How does OneRoster integration affect Atlas?
Currently, when your school signs up for Atlas, we request that you fill out the “Faculty Course Assignment (FCA)” spreadsheet to provide us with:
- List of users and emails;
- List of courses at the schools, and the subjects and grades of the courses;
- How users are related to the courses, as a curriculum writer/teacher.
With this approach, schools go through a tedious data conversion process to fit data into a specific format. And when the data changes, with faculty turn-over or teachers reassigned to new buildings and courses, Atlas admins need to update the data manually in Atlas.
With the OneRoster integration in Atlas, we work with your school’s IT team to set up regular data syncing between your OneRoster-formatted SIS data, and Atlas. This eliminates the manual work required to keep your Atlas user list, and course assignments updated! Your Student Information System is the single source of truth when it comes to teachers and their course assignments at your school; now Atlas will stay in sync with that data.
Does your school already have OneRoster-compliant data? Reach out to our support team and see how we can free up your time from system admin work!
