Integrating Banner and Moodle to help simplify the complexity of student enrolment

The use of Moodle has increased due to the growth in numbers of our online student and the increased use of Moodle by lecturing staff for our campus students.  The manual system of creating course and programme pages... [ view full abstract ]

The use of Moodle has increased due to the growth in numbers of our online student and the increased use of Moodle by lecturing staff for our campus students.  The manual system of creating course and programme pages and enrollments was becoming challenging to maintain.  Therefore the motivation for this project was the need to automate and simplify the Moodle course enrolment process for students.

Banner (the student registration system) and Moodle (the virtual learning environment) previously had no ability to communicate with each other due to the complexities of both systems.  The Centre for Online Learning and IT Services joined together to lead a collaborative project to remedy this. This core team had expertise in MIS, Ed Tech, Administration and Moodle. The core team worked directly with Moodle Partner programmers to create a Banner Integration Moodle plugin to link the two systems.  The team investigated the issues facing the integration of the two systems from an institutional, lecturer, student and an administration perspective.   

The team had to completely restructure how they categorised Moodle in order to enable the systems to communicate with each other.  In order to enable Moodle enrollment, the system first checks if the Moodle programme and modules pages already exist.  If they do not exist, the system auto-creates the relevant pages. Next, the system then creates the student account. Following that the student is enrolled onto their Moodle programme and modules.

The outcome of the Banner-Moodle integration project is an automated link between Banner and Moodle.  When a student enrolls on IT Sligo’s student registration system Banner, they are also enrolled onto on the corresponding programme and module pages/codes in Moodle.