Import learners into your portal can be a great way to instantly give access to your portal to all learners who you may wish to migrate from a student information system, learning management system, or other external database. Imported learners will be given instant access to your portal and all the content available inside of it.
Main benefits of learner imports to portals:
Easiest way to support a one time large migration of learners
Automatically provisions Riipen accounts as needed
Add additional demographic information for reporting purposes
Importing your learners if often the most efficient way to ensure you're populating accurate information in bulk and also creates a seamless on-boarding process for your learners.
General
Outcomes
When importing a learner into a portal, several outcomes will occur:
If the learner does not yet have a Riipen account, one will be provisioned for them and the user will receive an email notification letting them know their account has been created with next steps for them to take.
The learner will be added to the portal as a learner.
Any existing learners, or memberships to the portal will be unaffected.
Import template
When importing learners into your portal, Riipen will accept a comma separated value (CSV) file. You can download the template file attached to this article to get you started.
Required fields:
Email
Type: String
Description: This is the primary identifier for each user in Riipen. This must be unique for each learner. This field is case insensitive.
Optional fields:
First Name
Type: String
Description: The learner's first name.
Last Name
Type: String
Description: The learner's last name.
Identifier
Type: String
Description: This is a background identifier attribute which is used to identify a learner against your external data source such as a student information system. This value is not shown to or used by the learner in any way, but is useful for reporting purposes.
Level Name
Type: String
Description: The name of the program level your institution has the learner enrolled in. Possible values may include: Certificate, Bachelors, Masters, Doctorate, Technical Diploma, etc.
Year Name
Type: String
Description: The name of the year in which the learner is currently in for their enrolled program. Possible values may include: First Year, Freshman, Second Year, Sophomore, Masters, Doctorate, Alumni, etc.
Major Name
Type: String
Description: The learner's primary major.
Major Names
Type: Array[String]
Description: The learner's secondary declared major names. If more than one value, separate values with a semi-colon.
Minor Names
Type: String
Description: The learner's declared minor names. If more than one value, separate values with a semi-colon.
GPA Cumulative
Type: Float
Description: The learner's cumulative GPA at your institution.
GPA Department
Type: Float
Description: The learner's departmental GPA at your institution. Non-numeric values are not permitted.
Start Date
Type: Date
Description: The learner's start date for their enrolled program at your institution.
End Date
Type: Date
Description: The learner's end date for their enrolled program at your institution.
Currently Attending
Type: Boolean
Description: Whether or not the learner is currently enrolled at your institution.
Ethnicity
Type: String
Description: The learner's ethnicity.
Gender
Type: String
Description: The learner's gender.
Disability
Type: String
Description: Any disability of the learner.
Data Enrichment
You will notice that unlike other import types on Riipen, importing your learners to your portal gives you the optional ability to add a lot of demographic information about your learners which you may already have in your student information database. While this information is optional, is can be a great asset when it comes time to use the various reporting mechanisms available to your portal with in Riipen to answer questions such as "How many learners completed a project who are taking a given major" or "What was the average age of a learner who complete a business skill related project".
How To
Prepare an import file
To import learners into your portal, follow these steps:
Download the import template attached to this document. Your next step will largely be dependent on where you are wanting to import your data from. This may be from a learning management system, or a student information system.
Export your data from your external system.
Transform that data into the provided template to match its format.
For a full technical breakdown of import file formatting, see this article.
Run an import
The following steps can be completed by administrator of your portal.
Click "Settings" below the "Portal" group in the main navigation.
Select the "Imports" tab.
Click the "New" button
In the presented form, select:
Type - Portal learners
Source file - Upload your import file you have previously generated
Click "Submit"
Your import file will now begin to be pre-processed. Riipen will check each record in your file for potential errors including formatting issues or missing data. You will be able to see the progress of this pre-processing on your screen now.
Once pre-processing is complete you will be shown each record of your import file and it's pre-import status which shows you how the data was interpreted by Riipen. This is a good time to check over all your data to make sure it looks correct and you haven't made any mistakes in your original import file.
Once you are happy with your import records, you can then run your import by pressing the "Run" button.
Once your import has finished running, Riipen will email you to let you know with a link back to your import so you can view the final status.
View / monitor an import
While your import is running, or at any time, you will be able to see it's progress along with each individual record and its accompanying import status which is either Success or Error. While the import is running you can safely navigate away from this page and return to it at any point to check the import status.
To return to and view an import:
Click "Settings" below the "Portal" group in the main navigation.
Select the "Imports" tab.
Click the import you would like to monitor
Error handling
See this article for full details on how to handle import errors.