Additions to Get Academic Sections by School Level

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Lindsey Bryant
Lindsey Bryant ✭
Second Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper June 2023 Monthly Challenge
in Education Management APIs

@Stephen Boyle

Similar to the enhancement we saw on Get Academic Courses API, it would be extremely beneficial for the Get Academic Sections by School Level to be expanded to include some additional fields. Right now, these data points are available in a SKY List, but as we build our data warehouse tables off the API for current and now historical data, we've got several gaps.

Could we get these fields added to this API? We get “section_identifier” but we need “block”

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It would be great eventually to have the same array of the min, target and max for number of sections and section size as well for consistency like the Course API has. By adding these values, we could eliminate 3 PowerAutomate Jobs and 3 unique ETL jobs that populate 6 DW tables and streamline several business processes.

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Thanks for considering!

Comments

  • Stephen Boyle
    Stephen Boyle Blackbaud Employee
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic

    @Lindsey Bryant

    We are working to include room and block information in the section info of the Roster endpoints for Academics, Activities and Advisories in the next few weeks. I'll also review the Academics sections by school level endpoint (and the analogous activity and advisory ones) for future enhancement.

  • Lindsey Bryant
    Lindsey Bryant ✭
    Second Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper June 2023 Monthly Challenge

    @Stephen Boyle one other field I just found we don't have is Department! This is in the SKY list but not in the API. If this could be added as well, it would be great! For us, the Academic Section API is preferred as the Rosters API has so many redundant data points that the core academic and user APIs provide (Course, Section, School Level, User Extended, etc). Thanks!

  • Stephen Boyle
    Stephen Boyle Blackbaud Employee
    Ancient Membership Facilitator 2 Name Dropper Photogenic

    Hi @Lindsey Bryant,
    Two issues with department are that

    1. Departments are part of the Course as opposed to the section. So, we generally limit data returned about ‘parent’ objects to the basics.
    2. Courses can have multiple departments (e.g. “The History of Religions”). So, it would have to be an array returned for the course.

    And note that Department is returned in the Academics courses endpoint. As you pointed out for the Rosters endpoint, it is a struggle to get the balance right when deciding how much data to include about a ‘parent’ object when returning ‘child’ data. In addition to departments, courses also have course types, course custom fields, grade levels, scheduling defaults, etc. and including all of it falls into the same trap of too much duplicate data.

  • Lindsey Bryant
    Lindsey Bryant ✭
    Second Anniversary Facilitator 1 Name Dropper June 2023 Monthly Challenge

    @Stephen Boyle
    thanks for pointing out the departments are in the Academic Course API. We were grabbing this data from the Academic Departments API, but couldn't join the two back together. I appreciate your support as always!

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