Student Cohort Figures via Flat File Import

Introduction

To ensure correct recording of Student Cohort figures, eReserve Plus provides a mechanism to allow Library Staff to import Student Cohort figures into eReserve, for specific offerings using Flat File Import. These figures will be included within the Audit/Copyright Report when the report is generated.

Prerequisites

Prior to creating a Flat File Archive for importing Student Cohort Enrolment Numbers into eReserve Plus, you will need to identify the best source of accurate enrolment numbers. Depending on your institution’s course lifecycle this can be the Student Management System (SMS) or Learning Management System (LMS). Once identified you will need to coordinate with the appropriate people at your institution to export those enrolment numbers along with the full course code. Further detail is supplied later in this document.

Flat File Archive Creation

The Flat File Archive which is ultimately a zip file is required to contain two files. Following are those two files:

1. Data File
   This file contains the rows of student cohort details and is a CSV file in UTF-8 file format. The name of this file is required to be _importrecords.csv
2. The Mapping File
   This file in YAML format contains a definition for import and is authored by the eReserve Team. This will be provided to you by the eReserve Team and will need to be named _csv_to_documentmapping.yml when adding it to the zip file.

Should you need assistance with the Flat File Import, then please don’t hesitate to contact the eReserve Support Team.

Import File Columns

For the import_record.csv file creation, there are four columns. They are outlined below with a brief explanation about what the field is:

• source_document_kind: (required) This field outlines the type of kind that will be used. In this case, all input for this column, will be “offering”
• source_unit_code: (required) This field will contain the full code (aka course code, paper code, subject code, etc depending on the terminology of your institution) used for the offering of the course. This will be used when recording the cohort enrolment numbers on offering records in eReserve Plus then ultimately appear in reports.
• internal_cohort_count: (required) This field will contain the enrolment count for all internal students for the given offering.
• external_cohort_count: (optional) This field will contain the enrolment count for all external students for the given offering should you have that level of detail in enrolment numbers.

Data Sources

The student cohort enrolment numbers, to be supplied in the internal_cohort_count and external_cohort_count columns, can be exported from your SMS or LMS. The source of the enrolment numbers is dependent on your institution’s enrolment workflow which highlights where the most accurate numbers are kept.

The source_unit_code column is the full code (aka course code, paper code, subject code, etc) that is in your LMS (e.g. CS101_S2_2022). In most cases this full unit code is the same as that in your SMS. You will need to consult with your admin team to understand where these differ. For example, the SMS may have two separate codes but they are delivered as a combined course in the LMS.

For cross referencing communications of resources, the Audit Report has a column name “Offering Unit Code”, which indicates the full code to assist in the creation of the import_records.csv file.

Getting Started

To get you start we have an example Student Cohort Flat File Archive can be downloaded and viewed from here