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News and events
“How Pedagogue
Loads Student Data"
by Joe Sabin and Ted McClure
Overview
Pedagogue Solutions works with clients ranging
in size from small companies and departments up to large Fortune
100 companies. All clients, no matter how small or large,
require that their student rosters be loaded into the assessment
system so assessments can be assigned both at the individual
and group levels.
The Task
Information about the students must be imported
into the assessment system before assessments can begin. In
most cases, the student data must also be synchronized with
the employee database on a regular, ongoing basis. The degree
of automation in this process varies with the size and needs
of the client.
Methods
We work with several methods of information
transfer. The method most commonly used by our smaller clients
is e-mail, while larger clients use a file transfer or a database-to-database
transfer. There are several variations on the following methods,
but here we explain the most frequently used.
E-mailed Excel Spreadsheet
The most popular method for our smaller clients
(and even some large clients) is to e-mail us spreadsheets
with the student roster. Spreadsheets have been used to load
student populations ranging from 6 to 6,000 students into
PedagogueDirect portals. Many sales training organizations
keep their sales representative data in spreadsheets, so this
method makes it easy for them to get their student information
to us.
We are flexible in dealing with the formatting
of the spreadsheet and only require a few fields. Otherwise
the fields included can be anything the client wants to report
on: geographic information (territory, district, region),
job title, reporting relationships and more. The file is turned
into a CSV file and imported using a Pedagogue data loader.
File Transfer
Most of our larger PedagogueDirect users establish
a feed from one of their internal databases (e.g. an extract
from an ERP system, such as SAP). The customer extracts the
student data from an internal database and places it where
a person or server can FTP it to our secure FTP server. Once
on our server, there is a customized automated process that
loads the data into a custom student configuration.
We will work with any file format that allows
the information to be extracted. As with spreadsheets, the
fields included with an automated task can be flexible and
match up with the needs of the client.
Database to Database
Transfer
When the Pedagogue software is installed at
a client site, the Pedagogue database may be in the same network
as the client’s employee database. In this case, the
student data can be synchronized in Pedagogue by a fully automated,
direct transfer of data between the two databases.
In the employee database, permission is granted
for Pedagogue to access certain tables or views in the employee
database. If the databases are on different servers, a database
link is created between the two databases. Pedagogue Solutions
then customizes an import program that is stored in the Pedagogue
database. This program runs on a scheduled basis to synchronize
the student data in the Pedagogue database with the source
data.
The use of a database view allows the
owner of the source data to protect sensitive information.
For example, a client might want to use an employee management
system such as SAP to be the source. However, that system
may contain social security numbers, salary, home addresses,
etc. Those items can be completely hidden from the synchronization
script by using a view. The view establishes which database
tables and fields are available to the Pedagogue system. 
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