Metadata Import

After adopting Digication, schools often want to put together either usage reports or targeted assessment of student work created within Digication.  One of the tools that can help facilitate these efforts is the collection of relevant metadata about users and courses.  This type of collection is most effective when put in place early on, so that the data is already in place by the time it is needed.

As an example, a department collecting student work from 1000 students in 50 classes may be interested in assessing student submissions from honor students taking senior level classes.  In order to produce this dataset, Digication would need to know which students are honor students, and which classes are senior level.  

In addition to the standard Course and User CSV import, which includes some basic metadata like major and year of graduation, we provide the ability for schools to import any number of custom fields to aid in identifying specific datasets.  These fields are either associated with a user or a course.

User examples: major, minor, current GPA, current credit, year of graduation, current year, transfer student, honors student

Course examples: department, degree program, major requirement, major elective, general education, number of credits

Like the standard import, metadata import files can either be uploaded by an admin or HTTPS posted to Digication by an automated script.  

Here is an example command to post a user metadata import file to Digication using cURL:

curl -L -F type=csv.usermetadata&data=@import.csv https://campus.digication.com/import/index.digi?key=[identifier]

And an example for course metadata:

curl -L -F type=csv.coursemetadata&data=@import.csv https://campus.digication.com/import/index.digi?key=[identifier]

The [identifier] is an access key that can be generated in the import section of the Digication admin under "Import > Settings"

The format of the csv file is the same in either case.  The first row should contain the names of the columns, and the first column should always be the syncid of the user or course.  Every other column will be treated as an arbitrary field using the column name given in the first row, and the value provided will overwrite an previously provided metadata value with that column name (for the given user or course).

Attached are examples of the file format with some common metadata fields for users and courses.