Drupal Based Course Search via real-time data feeds from Banner

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gary.evans's picture
Posted by gary.evans on April 22, 2010 at 1:55am

Here are a few examples shared at DrupalConSF, these are still in dev and not in a production environment. Also we are working on overall performance:

Course Search:

http://beta.gr-3.net/programs-z
(Choose: Fall Semester >> Full Term >> Any Campus. You can add courses using the "Add to Schedule" button, we are working on integrating this with registration )

Quick linear overview of the basics:

http://beta.gr-3.net/college-basics

I'll post a Help Desk Module that works with Views and CCK and easy to add mobile module using JQTouch with campus map (http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/v3/demogallery.html) designed for Higher Edu when I get back.

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Comments

This looks very cool. Austin

Posted by attheshow on April 26, 2010 at 5:51pm
attheshow's picture

This looks very cool. Austin Peay State University is also using both Banner and Drupal. We don't have a course listing in place on our website currently, but I'm sure some people on campus would be interested in making use of this if we could. Do you have any plans to turn this into a module?

Mark W. Jarrell
Online Applications Developer
Richland Library
http://www.richlandlibrary.com
http://fleetthought.com
Twitter: attheshow

Nice Job..

Posted by tzack on April 26, 2010 at 8:04pm
tzack's picture

I will be starting a project that allows for this search functionally very soon. I would love to have a conversation with you about the issue you ran into and how you might improve it.

Tony Zack
Davenport University
http://davenport.edu

Contact Info

Posted by gary.evans on April 26, 2010 at 8:31pm
gary.evans's picture

I'll shoot you my contact info shortly

Hi Tony, This is Karan Bheda

Posted by blisstering on April 26, 2010 at 9:45pm
blisstering's picture

Hi Tony,
This is Karan Bheda -- from Blisstering Solutions. We are a California based company with an off-shore development team.
I can set up a meeting with one of our Engineers who worked on this with you.
Since they are based in Mumbai, a morning time would be preferable. Ideally 8am - 11.30am EST would be ideal. Please let me know what time works best for you.

Please send me an email directly at Karan.Bheda@Blisstering.com

Regards,
Karan

Very cool stuff. What are

Posted by tommyent on April 26, 2010 at 9:59pm
tommyent's picture

Very cool stuff. What are your plans?

Plans

Posted by gary.evans on April 26, 2010 at 11:24pm
gary.evans's picture

We are writing a module that will help make it easier for Colleges and Universities to manage the data exchange between Drupal and existing ERPs like Banner. I will post updates shortly.

Looks great!

Posted by David.Hamilton on April 27, 2010 at 3:59pm
David.Hamilton's picture

Kudos, this is really well done. For those who are curious, we've done something similar for our campus, which is a Datatel campus. It includes schedule building which is shared with advisors. Not all of that is available to the public, but the course searching is here:

https://www.amherst.edu/course_scheduler

It's all hand rolled so to speak, so I'm curious to see the data exchange module you mention. Thanks for sharing,

Solution that works with Drupal (but not Drupal-based)

Posted by adamfranco on April 30, 2010 at 7:51pm
adamfranco's picture

In case it is useful to anyone, I thought I share some details of our solution. At Middlebury College we recently launched a system that works with our new Drupal site, but is not built solely within Drupal. We chose to build our catalog outside of Drupal since we wished to read out of [a copy of] the Banner data directly rather than try to model the Banner data as Drupal nodes. Our system is made of two primary parts:

  • A Course Catalog application that provides course search and browse operations against a dump of Banner course data exported into a MySQL database nightly. This application also provides RSS feeds of courses and sections by department, subject, requirement-fulfilled, or instructor that we display in our front-end site.
  • Drupal CCK content types that allow department site editors to choose from a list of subjects and departments and insert course feeds into the site based on their chosen criteria. Our 'profile' content-type also includes an option to fetch the courses taught by the user.

Here are some examples of this system in action:

The Course Catalog application is written in PHP5 and is licensed under the GPL. It uses the Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I.)'s Course O.S.I.D. specification as its internal object-model. You can find documentation and download the application via the Git repository at:
https://www.assembla.com/spaces/course_catalog/wiki

One installation note: we haven't yet tried to run this application against Banner data from other schools, so there is a possibility that some non-general data assumptions may have snuck in. Please file a ticket if you try this application and find that it doesn't work with your Banner data.

looking forward to seeing how you interact with Banner

Posted by cfont on May 27, 2010 at 2:32pm
cfont's picture

Gary,
This search interface looks great. Do you see this as a way for schools to provide an online catalog of their classes and a starting point for registration OR also a way to start building an LMS using Drupal?

I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the "module that will help make it easier for Colleges and Universities to manage the data exchange between Drupal and existing ERPs like Banner."

Thanks for sharing.

Drupal in Education

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