Course Record Imports - Warnings and Precautions

Awarding partial or variable credit

When importing credit amounts less than the maximum number of credits on a course be sure that Variable is enabled on the configured credit types prior to import.

Certificates

Imported course shells do not have certificates. If a certificate is needed, create a course first and import the enrollments into that.

Importing enrollments

  1. When importing course record enrollments for users that do not exist in the system yet, it is recommended to have at least one required course object in the course. Otherwise, if there is nothing to prevent a user from being completed upon enrollment, the user will receive whatever credit may be available, regardless of the user's desired credit or any credit-mapping logic that may exist. 

  2. When creating course records, do not put credits on a record that is not complete (complete=0). The user may want to claim a different number of credits, however the credit record imported is the credit record that remains. The only workarounds are to re-import a completion with credit for the learner, or manually edit the credit.

Multiple credit types

  1. Add only one record per row. If learner is to receive more than one credit type, there must be multiple rows for the learner, with the credit_type column reflecting which credit type to award. Enter only one row per credit type awarded.

PARS

The global course report importer should only be used for importing legacy data. It is not included in PARS reports. To include in PARS, use the course-level importer.

Unlocking imports 

Occasionally, an import will hang due to a discrepancy in the file and the system will lock the import.  When this happens, you should review the import file to ensure there are no special characters in the data or additional spaces in the headers. To unlock the importer to re-import, following these steps:

  1. Log in as a site admin and go to /import.

  2. Click "Course record import."

  3. Click "Unlock" in the top header.

  4. Click "Unlock" button.

The import will be unlocked allowing you to re-import.

Updating enrollments 

The course record importer cannot be used to update enrollments or credit records that have been assigned to a user. 

Reporting credit to external entities such as boards.

Imported credit records will not trigger reporting to external entities such as CPE monitor, PARS or an AMS.

A workaround for this would be to import users with completions but not credit records. Upon import, if the user exists, and is complete and the credit is non-variable, the credit will automatically be awarded and then report as expected.