Overview:

Course Import is MyCreditsTransfer's new version of the old Request Import Interface. Like its predecessor Request Import, Course Import allows students to extract coursework from a MyCreditsTransfer member institution’s student information system at the request of a participating student, which prevents the student from having to manually input their coursework into Transferology, greatly increasing utilization and reducing errors. 

However, Course Import is a web application that does the same work as the old Request Import and increases security. Unlike its predecessor, Course Import is NOT a Java application so there is no need to install the JDBC driver, Java Developers Kit, or Tomcat which greatly simplifies installation time and effort!

Technical Details:

This web application can be ASP Classic or ASP.Net or PHP. A fully functional ASP Classic version is avialable for download as a template for your development. An ASP.Net version using windows authentication written by a partner school is also available for download but will likely require modification. I also have a partiallly completed php verison that is in developement avialable (contect me).

There are two key activities that the interface needs to provide:

1. Student Authentication: It is necessary to authenticate the requesting student to ensure that coursework transmitted are the records of the requester only.  There are two options available to accomplish this authentication, a custom authentication method for this project or you can use an existing single sign in method used at your school with some modifications.

When a student starts an import they will be directed to the login page you specify and you will receive a string from Transferology with several variables that must be stored for use after authentication in createing the XML’ document of the student coursework and to tie the student’s coursework back to the student’s Transferology account.

The string will look like this:

https://authenticationpage.xxx?key=2003102718134030&uid=admin@CASRI&return=https://www....

• key=2003102718134030 is a Transferology supplied key. This is a unique identifier of the transaction request from Transferology, and is used to match the reply with the request when the academic history is returned to the Transferology server.
• uid=admin@CASRI is the Transferology user that has requested the import.  This is a Transferology student created anonymous ID.
• return=http://www…….. is the Transferology supplied return URL. This is the web address for the requesting Transferology server.  It ensures that requests are only returned to the requestor, and to an authorized Transferology instance. Port 443 or 80 except incomming traffic from any IP.

If you want to explicitly specify the port, you can use these URLs as the return:
https://www.transfer.org:443/legacy/service/xml
http://www.transfer.org:80/legacy/service/xml
https://www.transfer.org:443/uselect/service/xml
http://www.transfer.org:80/uselect/service/xml

2. Transfer coursework request and communication:  This process is the querying of the coursework from the participating institution’s student information system using a view created for this purpose (or through an intermediate database) and assembly of that data into a compliant XML document. The assembled XML document is transmitted via HTTPS from your school back to Transferology.  Transferology will consume the document, and populate the student’s academic history in their Transferology coursework. An .asp/VB Script to accomplish the assembly of the XML document is included as a sample but there are multiple way you could do this.

We need to end up with a course history for the student with each course taken for credit as shown below:

term	dept	crse_numb	credithours	grade	crsetitle
200603	JOUR	101	3	A	Intro to Journalism
200708	CHEM	101	4	B	Intro to Chemistry

stuID or Username	This field is not necessarily required but you probably need some sort of Unique ID for each student to join tables and you can select it if needed (Transferology does not need it and it will not be sent to Transferology)
term	The year and month the course was taken corresponding to your term structure in Transferology. 01, 02 - Winter 03, 04 - Spring 05, 06, 07 - Summer 08-12 - Fall
dept	Course department prefix (transcript version)
crse_numb	Course number
credithours	Credit hours completed for the course
grade	Student’s grade in the course
crsetitle	Title of the course

2. (continued) Building and Sending the XML:

Now that the student has been authenticated and their coursework selected, the application needs to create and send an XML document back to Transferology.

A sample of the return XML document is available here.

Documentation and Downloads:

 Installation Instructions for the ASP Classic version. This may be usefull as a template to build this in your environment also.

 ASP Classic sample version.

ASP.Net with Windows authentication sample verion.

Request Import (old) version. (Not recomended but many schools still have this version installed. Support for this version is limited.)

Request Import (old) version overview. (Documents are also included with the .zip file.)