Introduction to SuperGlue
Overview
SuperGlue supports the California Community Colleges' many initiatives by providing a technology integration framework for all 116 community colleges in support of more than 2 million students per year.
SuperGlue started in 2016 in response to the growing need to deliver data from systemwide services to colleges using different ERP/SIS systems.
Project SuperGlue combines several technologies:
application integration
service orchestration
API management
data integration
These technologies leverage existing open-source technology or cloud services from AWS, as well as developed and managed technologies to support ERP/SIS integrations.
These components are associated with SuperGlue:
Flow of Data
The diagram below illustrates how SuperGlue has integrated many CCCTC enterprise applications with the primary ERPs in use by our colleges.
SuperGlue has also been extended to provide support for writing transactional data into the CCC Data data lake, which is then processed into the CCC Data Warehouse.
The diagram below shows the most common usage of SuperGlue, with the Orchestration Layer feeding to the college’s built-in tables.
CVC-OEI Data Integration
SuperGlue has the ability to transmit student application information from the “home” college to the “teaching” college in support of a student registering for an online course. The storage of data in a college ERP is not standardized between different SISs. Furthermore, there are no agreed upon standards even among colleges using the same SIS.
Data could be written into the teaching college ERP as a SQL write, but college concerns over data integrity and governance made that problematic. Instead, treating the transfer as a defined transaction via a web service was preferred. The transfer “across” the wire needs to be in a “standard” or canonical format. As such, utilizing staging tables within each Student Information System provides a standard way of delivery, while then allowing colleges to process each record into the built-in tables as desired to fit individual college needs.
College Adaptor
SuperGlue for Apply securely delivers CCCApply records - in near real-time - to a staging table in your college IT environment via the SuperGlue College Adaptor. Records include the entire CCCApply dataset, including the college's custom Supplemental Questions.
Data Lake and Data Warehouse
As a part of the evolution of SuperGlue, these features have been implemented:
application to college
determining placement based on multiple measures business rules
bi-directional communication of fraud reports between colleges
The Data Warehouse is a shared space where researchers and the Chancellor’s Office can get data for all colleges.
Diagram 4 shows the state of some of the SuperGlue services. The elements are fully deployed and live supporting all colleges. The College Adaptor is available to all colleges today including schools that use Banner, Colleague, PeopleSoft, and Ethos.
SuperGlue’s impact can be summarized with an example of a potential student who creates an account with OpenCCC for the first time.
The student explores careers using Career Coach, then completes the application in CCCApply.
SuperGlue kicks off a workflow event.
SuperGlue transfers application data to the associated SIS College Adaptor.
The Adaptor transforms the data to the SIS-specific system.
SuperGlue copies a subset of the application data to the MyPath student profile.
SuperGlue queries California College Guidance Initiative (CCGI) for that student’s high school transcripts.
Profile and transcript data are transmitted to the Multiple Measures Placement Service (MMPS) Placement Engine.
Student placement recommendation is generated, then SuperGlue transmits the placement recommendation to the College Adaptor’s staging table, as well as storing that data in the CCC Data Lake.
College Adaptor Features
SuperGlue integrations deliver data to colleges via the SuperGlue College Adaptor, which is installed behind the college’s firewall at the college’s request. The SuperGlue College Adaptor provides these features:
ability for colleges to receive student application data and verified transcript student placement records directly to their college’s IT environment
support for common workflows and data exchange between systemwide products such as MyPath and the college SIS, and delivers student data to the CCC Data Warehouse
Glue for Apply
SuperGlue’s Glue for Apply feature delivers student application data directly to the College’s SIS via the SuperGlue College Adaptor.
This includes the following CCCApply applications:
Standard Application
International Application
California College Promise Grant Application
Non-Credit Application
Glue for Apply delivers the full dataset for each of these applications directly to colleges within seconds of the student submitting them.
For a complete list of data elements delivered for each application, please visit the CCCApply Data Dictionaries page directly or jump to each application section via the links below:
Multiple Measures Placement Service (MMPS)
SuperGlue’s College Adaptor supports the CCCTC MMPS feature by delivering verified student transcript placement information and/or self-reported transcript placement information directly to the college SIS.
For more details on MMPS, see the Multiple Measures Placement Service (MMPS) Placement Logic and Implementation Guide.
Data Lake and Data Warehouse Integration
CCC Data is a combination of data sources stored, governed, and presented in ways which are the most effective for the intended use. A data lake is deployed to capture data, in its raw form, from operational data stores.
Multiple Measures (summarized above) also supports the use of Conductor to ensure its data is stored in the data lake as well as in the colleges’ SIS systems. SuperGlue writes MMPS placement data to an S3 bucket using the s3Sync microservice.
Other data integrations, particularly those involving table replication, are not as well suited to SuperGlue. For those, we employ AWS services like the Data Migration Service (DMS) and AWS Glue.
The Data Lake consists of multiple S3 buckets, some of which SuperGlue writes to, some of which do not involve SuperGlue.
SuperGlue is not integrated with the Data Warehouse directly. Instead, SuperGlue passes data to the data lake where it is then processed by an AWS Glue job into the Data Warehouse.