Creating and Managing Courses

eThink Education manages your site's integration with your institution’s Student Information System (SIS). This allows for the creation of courses and the enrollment of teachers and students to occur automatically.

When a course is created or cancelled within your SIS, the change will be reflected in your site. The same is true when instructors are reassigned, or learners add, drop, or withdraw from a course. These changes are not always immediate, and are typically triggered by one of two events: Login sync (if enabled), or a nightly task (the default configuration for sites using our integration). 

1. Login Sync: As soon as a user logs in to your site, their enrollment will be automatically updated. If the user has enrolled in a course that does not yet exist on your site, logging in will trigger the creation of the course, then the user's enrollment in the course. 
2. Nightly Task: Most sites using our integration are configured to run a complete synchronization between your SIS and your site each night, typically between 1:00am and 3:00am. There are separate tasks for creating courses and enrolling users. The task to enroll users runs later than the task to create courses since users can't be enrolled in courses that don't exist yet. 

At the start of a term when courses and enrollments are still fluctuating, you can use the Login As functionality to trigger these updates rather than waiting for the nightly sync in order to troubleshoot issues related to accessing courses. You can also submit a support request to set the task to run more frequently. Running these tasks more frequently does come with the risk of longer site load times, which is why they are scheduled to run overnight when fewer users are active on your site. 

For more information about eThink's customized enrollment integration, please consult our Knowledge Base (opens in new window), About eThink's Enrollment Integration.