Anthology Student SIS Integration: Cortex

This article covers the following topics:

• Overview
• Integration Requirements
• Anthology Student SIS’ API Endpoints
• CourseKey Setup
• Data Syncs Between the Anthology Student SIS and Cortex
• Integration Monitoring and Support

Overview

Cortex is CourseKey’s end-to-end software platform built exclusively for career colleges and vocational training, that combines all institutional data in one location.  Cortex puts critical decision-making resources at your fingertips in real-time, so you have the power to improve the entire student journey from enrollment to placement and everything in between.  Cortex simplifies data sharing and decision-making across the institution by enabling: 

• data integration and standardization across institutional departments and processes; 
• data visualization on critical stages (enrollment, retention, and placement) of the student journey and key institutional/program compliance processes; and 
• data and communication automations with staff and students.

For CourseKey customers already enabled with the Anthology Student SIS integration, an extended integration to enable the Cortex’ Enrollment, Retention, and Placement Workspaces is available.  The integration is automated, via Rest API, and managed by CourseKey, to sync data on the institutions’ programs of study (and program versions), students, students’ program enrollments, and students’ job placement from the SIS, and to support student program enrollment, progression and job placement tracking as well as program and institutional compliance activities.

As part of the enablement of the Cortex platform, your Customer Success Manager and Integrations Manager at CourseKey will assist and walk you through the integration process, which includes functional and technical discovery, configuration, installation, user acceptance testing, training, and go-live.

This article covers general information about the integration, and additional documentation is available upon request.  Contact your Customer Success Manager or submit a support request if you would like to learn more about Cortex and/or our integration with the Anthology Student SIS.

Integration Requirements

Having enabled the Anthology SIS integration with CourseKey for students’ attendance tracking, enabling the extended integration to support the enablement of Cortex requires that the institution grants the designated CourseKey’s service account with access to additional API endpoints (see the list below) for executing GET requests.

Anthology Student SIS’ API Endpoints

The following Anthology Student SIS’ API endpoints are leveraged by the CourseKey integration  for the enablement of Cortex:

CourseKey Setup

The extended integration to enable Cortex leverages the setup and configuration for the Anthology SIS integration with CourseKey for real-time attendance tracking.  Our Integration Manager coordinates with an Enablement Engineer to complete enablement for the extended data integration jobs, for syncing the customer’s data on programs of study (and program versions), students, students’ program enrollments, and students’ job placement.  This enablement is completed in both the Staging environment, for user acceptance testing; and the Production environment.

Data Syncs Between the Anthology Student SIS and Cortex

The institution’s SIS is the source of truth for programs (program versions), students, students’ program enrollments, and students’ job placements, and our integration ensures that required data in the SIS are in parity with Cortex.

The integration with the Anthology Student SIS for the enablement of Cortex handles data syncs on a scheduled basis, with data refreshed once every 1 hour.  (This rate of refresh can be increased or decreased depending on each institution’s needs).  Permissioned Admin users can review their institution’s schedule for data syncs in the Integrations Insight Dashboard.

The integration process works as follows.

These SIS data are leveraged in the Cortex’ Enrollment, Retention and Placement Workspaces.  For instance, in the Retention Workspace, school admins, instructors, and staff can access a detailed view of a student’s risk score, along with information from the student’s profile – including the program, email address, student enrollment status, schools in which they are taking courses, start date and graduation date.

See our articles on the Cortex’ Enrollment, Retention and Placement Workspaces to learn more.

Note on Date/Time Attributes Synced from the Nexus SIS 

In the Anthology Student SIS, there is no concept of timezone.  The Anthology Student SIS uses the SQL server DateTime from the database server, which does not have an associated timezone.  The assumption is that the DateTime of the database server is set by an institution based on the location of its main location/campus; or on the timezone of their choosing – when it operates campuses in multiple locations and/or offers online/blended programs.  

The Anthology Student SIS is designed to handle DateTime attributes in the following way:

• Automatic DateTime attributes, like CreatedDateTime and LastModifiedDateTime, are stored in the institution’s server timezone.  If for example, the server is located in California, the datetime matches the PDT/PST timezone.
• DateTime properties entered by a user, like Lead Date and Time, are stored as inputted.  If for example, 07/26/2022 6:00pm is entered, 07/26/2022 18:00 is stored.

For DateTime attributes that the CourseKey’s integration syncs from a customer’s Anthology Student SIS, we store the exact DateTime values returned by the Anthology Student SIS’s API endpoints, ignoring any timezone considerations.  That is, if for example we get a 07/26/2022 6:00pm (input or automatic), we store 07/26/2022 6:00pm in CourseKey.

Integration Monitoring and Support

For customers enabled with the integration between the Anthology Student SIS and CourseKey, the process is fully-managed by the CourseKey team.  The CourseKey team monitors data syncs to ensure data updates and process continuity.

If you have questions or need to report an incident with your institution’s SIS data syncs, submit a support request.

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