External Course
ampEducator allows you to integrate courses from external learning management systems (LMS), such as Brightspace, Canvas, and Moodle, to streamline enrollment and grading. Before linking an external course, the external course provider must first be configured in the Institution Configuration / Courses / Ext section.
Once an external course provider is configured, you can link an external course to ampEducator. Once linked, enrollment and grading data can be synced manually or set to sync automatically once per day by enabling Daily Sync, which runs overnight in Eastern Standard Time (EST).
Once you've configured your external courses, you can add them during the creation of a new course. To do this, go to Courses and click Start New Course. In the External Course Provider dropdown, select the provider you’ve configured. A list of available courses from that provider will appear. Select the course you want to integrate, and customize your settings (see 'External Course Settings and Syncing' for more information). The course will sync only with the selected sections.
To add an external course to a course that has already been created, navigate to the course’s LMS tab and select External Course. Click Enable External Course, then choose the configured course provider. From the list of available courses linked to that provider, select the course you want to integrate.
In the External Course section of the LMS tab for your course, you can configure various sync settings for the external course integration. These settings allow you to manage how student data, enrollment, grades, and other course elements are synchronized between ampEducator and the external course provider. The key options include:
- Create External Students: When checked, students who are enrolled in the external course but not yet in ampEducator will automatically be created in the system.
- Use External Enrollments: When enabled, students enrolled in the external course will also be enrolled in ampEducator.
- External Grades: When selected, grades from the external course will be retrieved and synced into ampEducator. When synced, you will not be able to update the local gradebook or grading schema.
- External Final: Enabling this option will use the final grade provided by the external course. If unchecked, ampEducator will calculate the final grade based on the course grading schema and the grades entered within the system.
- Daily Auto Sync: Automatically syncs the external course data once per day to ensure it is up-to-date.
To manually trigger a sync, scroll down to the External Course Sync Log section. Here, you can click the Sync Now button to instantly sync data from the external course, instead of waiting for the scheduled auto-sync.
