Welcome to our first tech post! These posts will give the campus a behind-the-scenes look at the systems that power EEE Canvas and the transition.
Today we’re going to be covering: EEE GrandCentral
When we first started providing EEE Canvas to the campus, we wanted to give instructors the freedom to teach courses on EEE Canvas the way they want to teach them. EEE GrandCentral was built to provide instructors with the flexibility to tailor their course spaces to their teaching needs.
EEE GrandCentral is a web application developed in-house by the Office of Information Technology’s Academic Web Technologies team. The tool enables instructors to manage their course spaces in EEE Canvas. It also automates data processes to integrate EEE Canvas with Registrar and directory data.
As EEE Canvas is a vendor product, it needs to be told all about our courses, instructors, students, and other data and information about our campus. As the team that supports Canvas, we needed to make sure to send this information up to Canvas in a secure and maintainable way. In addition, the data needs to be continuously updated to reflect changes; a one-time data dump would not work.
The user-facing side of EEE GrandCentral allows instructors to fully customize how they want to set up their course space on Canvas. This gives instructors the freedom to teach courses on Canvas how they want to teach them. Instructors can also associate observers and additional students, as well as modify existing course spaces. More information on this process can be found at https://help.eee.uci.edu/canvas/instructors/self-provision/
The invisible-to-end-users side of GrandCentral, lovingly referred to as “GC Auto”, acts as the middleman between data sources on campus and Canvas. It automates the data synchronization between our campus and Canvas without any human intervention,makes sure data on EEE Canvas is up to date, and communicates course space information between EEE GrandCentral and EEE Canvas.
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading about the systems that make EEE Canvas go. if you liked this post and want more tech posts in the future, let us know!