Forum .LRN Q&A: How do you manage first data upload?

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1: How do you manage first data upload?
Posted by Anders Iwers on 01/19/06 04:53 PM
Hello everybody!!

After poking around a couple of days in this wonderful forum, here comes my first post.

We're discussing the posibility of using .LRN platform for our high school, so we've made some research, tested a bit the platform, etc.

The main problem that came across was:
How it's suppose we should manage our data uploads? I'm completely sure that this huge universities are not typing classes and adding users one by one to them.
How do you, people, do this huge first uploads? Is there some .LRN functionality I'm not aware of?
Could you put me in the rigth directions?

Sorry if there are already posts about this issue. I assure you I've done research efforts first.

Thanks in advance,

Anders

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2: Re: How do you manage first data upload? (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on 01/19/06 05:02 PM
Hi Anders,

For users here is a "bulk upload" feature in the dotlrn user adminstration lets you upload from a CSV (excel) file.

There is also some integration that has been created with the IMS Enterprise spec if your school system happens to support that (probably unlikely for a high school).

Do you happen to use LDAP in your school? There is also integration written for that.

Are you from the US? What software is your current class lists in?

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3: Re: How do you manage first data upload? (response to 1)
Posted by Carl Robert Blesius on 01/19/06 05:33 PM
Hi (and welcome) Anders.

Caroline covered two options:

1. Bulk upload using a CSV document
2. Integrating with your high school's student system (I am guessing this might be hard, but it would come with glory and it might be a service you could market if other high schools use the same system)

Here is a third:

3. Allowing self-registration with approval (this might be the easiest for you, just let people register and then approve them). Note: there is also the option of auto-approving a certain email pattern (e.g. if all your teachers have a standard email mailto:*@hacker.high.school.com)

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4: Re: Res: How do you manage first data upload? (response to 1)
Posted by Anders Iwers on 01/23/06 12:40 PM
Hi!!!

First of all, thank you very much for your input, people, it's great to feel supported!

I knew bulk upload from users, but our main problem actually is how to set all info up (and not only users), I mean:
- classes
- users
- relationship between users and classes
- comunities
- relationship between users and comunities
- calendar
and so on...

So, I was wondering if there were some application to upload data previous to the production state, maybe something that read preformatted data (XML, CVS or whatever) and place it in the correct field

or if you don't know or it doesn't exist

what is your way to procced with this issue? Maybe you are acting directly with the database or you programmed a special module for it. I looked to the database design not long ago but I was completely overwhelmed.

Thank you in advance!!

PS: we are using for our backoffice SQL Server and our data doesn't follow any spec, I'm afraid

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5: Re: How do you manage first data upload? (response to 1)
Posted by Caroline Meeks on 01/23/06 06:47 PM
Hi Anders,

If you don't have an IMS standard export available we usually call it a "Migration". We have lots of collective experience doing migrations. Jade has collected a bunch of resources here:

http://rubick.com:8002/openacs/acs_to_openacs.

There are a couple approaches. Solution Grove did a migration from an Access database dump of a Banner system. In that case the old system had already been taken down so we exported everything to a set of CSV's and wrote scripts to uploaded them.

The other approach, which is used when we go from an very old ACS version (3x) to the newer ones is connecting AOLServer to both the old and the new databases. For Museum of Science We connected AOLServer to get data directly from thier SQLServer membership database so the duel connection approach is definitely an option for you.

Take a read through those links and then feel free to ask some more questions.

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6: Re: Res: Re: How do you manage first data upload? (response to 5)
Posted by Anders Iwers on 01/24/06 12:31 PM
Thank you very much, Caroline!!

It seems to me that this is exactly the info I'm looking for :D

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7: Re: Re: Res: Re: How do you manage first data upload? (response to 6)
Posted by Haynes Horne on 02/02/06 11:43 PM
Is there any reason not to bring records (of whatever type)directly into the postgres instance through psql, assuming the expected data structures matched? Why would you want to link two aolservers to distinct data sources? Do you need to capture something into the record only the UI generates?
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8: Re: Res: Re: Re: Res: Re: How do you manage first data upload? (response to 7)
Posted by Anders Iwers on 02/06/06 09:30 AM
[quote]
Is there any reason not to bring records (of whatever type)directly into the postgres instance through psql, assuming the expected data structures matched?
[/quote]

well, that's exactly what we want to do (populate our dotLRN database with the data of our SQLServer), but the database description of dorLRN is completely overwhelming for me. Just wondering if there are some standard scripts to do that :)