Table of Contents
Overview
Background
What Does This Mean
Workarounds
Future Roadmap
Related Articles
Overview
This article outlines how Colleague customers who are integrated via Ethos can address functionality related to creating and updating empty meeting times for sections.
Background
The Ethos API is used to send data from Coursedog to Colleague.
To create a meeting time, we use the “instructional-events” API, which creates and updates instructional events.
Within the “instructional-events” API, there is an object called a “recurrence pattern”, which contains the actual meeting information (such as start time, days of the week, and start/end dates).
If we try to create a “recurrence pattern” that contains empty start times and empty days, it will be rejected by Ethos. Ethos will not allow us to create these “empty” meetings via the API even though you can 100% do this directly in Colleague.
We have reached out to Ellucian and they have confirmed this limitation on multiple fronts.
We have created a ticket with them to address it (we are requesting the instructional-events Ethos API be enhanced to allow a location to be defined within the payload without requiring recurrence information such as start/end times and days of the week).
What Does This Mean
Overview
This Ellucian issue will impact any customer workflows that need to create “empty” meeting times.
Coursedog has engineered a partial workaround to maximize the functionality customers can have despite the Ellucian defect.
If a customer creates an “empty” meeting time in Coursedog, our integration will NOT send a “recurrence pattern” in the integration. In other words, we will create an “instructional event” that you can assign a room and instructor to, but there will be no time information associated with that event. Coursedog feels like this approach (while still incurring limitations as described below) is the most effective, as it allows customers to still assign room and instructors to these “empty” meetings.
Limitations
If a user attempts to edit the “dates” of a meeting (i.e. start date or end date), this information will not flow through to the SIS. This is because there is no recurrence pattern, so there is no field to save this information to.
If a user attempts to add “days of the week” but keeps the start time and end time as empty, this data will also not flow through to the SIS.
If a user attempts to enter the time as “midnight to midnight”, this will also be treated as an empty meeting time and we will not send any time information.
Workarounds
Overview | Workaround 1 | Workaround 2 | Workaround 3
Overview
To address the limitations noted above, we have a few potential workarounds.
Workaround 1
Overview
Instead of using empty meeting times, use a wide range, such as 1AM to 11PM
Pros
This will allow you to edit the days and dates of these “empty” meeting times.
Cons
The Coursedog system will think these sections meet for 22 hours of the day and can throw conflicts for room double bookings.
Reminder
You will not be able to set “midnight to midnight” due to the limitation noted above.
Workaround 2
Overview
Edit the “empty” meetings in the SIS instead of Coursedog
Pros
You can fully edit these meetings to the extent that Colleague allows within the Colleague UI
Cons
You have to ensure end-users recognize to switch to Colleague when they need to make edits.
Workaround 3
Overview
Allow Coursedog to convert all “empty” meeting times to “midnight to midnight” meeting times.
If you would like this workaround, please reach out to Coursedog support, as it must be enabled for you.
Once enabled, this workaround will apply to all sections automatically, and empty times will be converted to midnight times (and midnight times will be untouched).
As a result, we will send “midnight” to the SIS as that will allow the user to set day and date information.
Pros
Ethos will accept recurrence patterns formatted with a start time of midnight and end time of midnight.
This will allow end users to also edit the days and start/end dates of the recurrence pattern.
Cons
Similar to the first workaround, this will block out the whole day in the calendar, and can create double booking conflicts for rooms and instructors.
Future Roadmap
Coursedog is regularly asking Ellucian for updates on the Ethos API issue. While Ellucian has not provided a timeline for resolution, we have expressed its severity on multiple occasions.
Coursedog will also be building hard-coded logic for Colleague customers to flag potential issues related to empty times in the section editing modal. This will allow end users to recognize when they need to take action, and customers will be able to customize the error message to indicate which workaround they would like the end-user to utilize.