Remember the times when you received exam results through physical mail? Checking the results on the bulletin board was never a pleasant experience. Long gone are those times. With online student portals, you can find the results in your browser once they are available.
For one of our customers, the ABCloudz team created an exam results card to bring the results even closer to students. Once a student logs in to the Ellucian Experience platform, an interactive card shows the top-level module results. Getting detailed information is as easy as sharing great news with friends.
In this blog post, we talk about a reusable solution that the ABCloudz team delivered for one of the universities in the UK. Our team implemented the Data Connect pipelines to get the exam results from the Ellucian Banner SaaS database and display them on an Ellucian Experience card. However, our team has tons of experience with other Ellucian-based projects for higher education institutions.
Are you looking for a trusted partner to improve your experience with Ellucian software? From automation and modernization to complex integrations and development projects, ABCloudz is here to help! Read these blog posts to understand why Ellucian trusts ABCloudz to deliver projects for many higher education institutions.
Current state architecture
Before the ABCloudz team created an interactive exam results card, the students didn’t use the Ellucian Experience platform to check their results. The students had to wait for the results of the latest exam to become available on their page. However, an even harder task was to find the exam results from previous terms.
The following image shows the current state of the customer’s architecture.
In this example, the students don’t have a consolidated place to find the exam results for different courses and different terms. Tracking all your progress in a single place is essential for education, sports, finances, and other life areas. With this approach in mind, our team shaped the design of an efficient solution that fits not only this customer but many others as well.
Developing a reusable exam results card
First of all, we developed a simple and clear exam results card that fits the Ellucian Experience design best practices. The card displays all top-level module results for the selected term and program using two dropdown lists that let the student choose the appropriate filters.
Each listed result represents an individual module within the selected program and term. After the student clicks on the result, they can see a detailed view of all related assessments and marks. They can expand each result item to see all the assessments that make up the final grade in detail.
For more information, the student can expand a specific result item to see a detailed breakdown of assessment components and scores directly within the card. This summary page was the only source of information about exam results for students in their previous life. Navigating between these pages was a real pain, and most students complained about the lack of a comprehensive view of their grades and term results.
This approach unfolds information in three simple steps and provides users with a comprehensive view of a specific topic. Exam results, timetables, library stats, or parking fees — you name it, we can easily tailor this existing approach to your needs.
Future state architecture
To implement this bespoke solution, the ABCloudz team created several Data Connect pipelines, each responsible for a different layer of exam results and implemented the exam results card in the Ellucian Experience.
The following image shows the future state architecture.
The Experience card triggers the primary pipeline when the student opens the dashboard or interacts with the exam results card. This pipeline retrieves the module results for the selected term and program, which the student chooses using the dropdown lists. The primary pipeline gets the following information from the Banner SaaS API: term, study path or program, course identifier and title, credit hours, grades, and the date and reason for the grade change. Additional pipelines retrieve the assessment components and their subcomponents, enabling the Experience card to display a complete drill-down structure of each module.
Next, when the student chooses a course to explore, the detail pipelines load a full breakdown of all assessments that contributed to the final grade. The Experience card shows this result, while the detailed information is just a click away.
When the student selects a different term or program, the Experience card refreshes the list of available results for the selected context. When the student expands a specific result item, the Experience card calls the detail pipelines, which return an array of records with the following information: assessment type (exam, quiz, research paper), completion date, total score, and comments.
Finally, our team created custom APIs to retrieve the student group, area, and program adjustment records that Banner does not expose through standard endpoints. These APIs enrich the pipelines with the adjustment data needed to display accurate results for exempt or transferred modules.
Benefits and results
The ABCloudz team completed the project just before the end of the term so that all students could use this new approach to check the exam results in Ellucian Experience. The well-oiled pipelines and beautifully designed Experience card delivered the exam results as expected, with no complaints from students. At the end of the day, seeing your grades is essential as tap water, electricity supply, or Internet access.
Our team can customize this reusable solution to create Experience Cards for your needs. Do you have an idea of a new card for your Ellucian Experience dashboard? It would be a great honor for ABCloudz to bring this idea to life!
Streamline your Ellucian Experience projects with professionals
ABCloudz helps Ellucian users by solving the hardest technical challenges in many integration, modernization, and automation projects. We combine a deep understanding of the needs that higher education institutions have with a strong technical expertise in the world of data management. Read the Ellucian-based success stories and contact us today to get started with the implementation of your Ellucian project.