Administrator Documentation

Set up a course offering to manage Bulk Course Export

If you want to enable users in your organization who do not have direct access to your file server to use Bulk Course Tools to upload input files, you can create a course offering template to provide access to the inbox and outbox folders through Brightspace. Enrolling users into the course shell will enable them to gain access to the inbox location.

Create a course offering template for Bulk Course Export

Before you use Bulk Course Export, you must use Courses to create a generic support or system template (shell).

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Important: Refer to Manage courses and course templates with the Courses tool for information about how to create a new course template or copy an existing course template. D2L recommends that you enter the course template Name as Bulk Course Export and course template Code as BCE.

Set the inbox and outbox path for your course template

Once you have created a new course template using Courses, you can use Bulk Tool Configuration to set the Inbox Path and Outbox Path to subfolders of the course offering path. These paths allow a user to access your course template Manage Courses tool to upload a CSV file for easy course export. For example, if your Course Offering Path is \content\enforced\138731-BCE then your inbox folder is \content\enforced\138731-BCE\Inbox and your outbox folder is \content\enforced\138731-BCE\Outbox\.

Note: If you have set the d2l.Tools.CMS.CoursePathEnforced configuration variable to Off, you can customize the course offering path. If you customize the course offering path, the bulk export folders must still be located under the organization’s \content\ directory.

To locate and create inbox and outbox paths

From Admin Tools, click Courses.
Click the Templates tab. Search for your Bulk Course Export template.
Click your Bulk Course Export template name to navigate directly to the Course Administration page for that template.
Click Manage Files.
From the Manage Files tab, do the following:
- Click New Folder and name it Inbox.
- Click New Folder and name it Outbox.

Update the Bulk Course Export Path

Once you have created the Inbox and Outbox folders in your Bulk Course Create course template, you can update Bulk Course Export paths to match.

Important: You must ensure that you are setting Bulk Tool Configuration paths from the Org Unit homepage of your Bulk Course Export template.

To update paths

From the Admin Tools menu, click Bulk Tool Configuration.
From the Bulk Course Export tab, do the following:
- Under Inbox Path, click Change Path and then browse to the inbox path under the course offering path. For example, /content/enforced/138731-BCE/Inbox.
- Under Outbox Path, click Change Path and then browse to the outbox path under the course offering path. For example, /content/enforced/138731-BCE/Outbox.
Click Save.

Grant users access to specify courses to export in the course shell

The following permissions enable users to specify courses to export when the next scheduled task runs by uploading CSV files to the inbox folder using the Manage Courses tool inside the course offering.

Note: Enrolling users into the course shell enables them to gain access to the inbox location.

From the Admin Tools menu, click Roles and Permissions.
Click the role that you want to grant permissions.
In the Filter by Tool list, select Manage Files and then click Apply Filter.
In the Course Offering section, select the See the File Listing, Upload Files, and Edit Files permissions and then click Save and Close.

Export courses using the course offering

You must be enrolled in the course and have an Active status to see the bulk course export offering in the course selector and Manage Files area.

Note: Brightspace course packages now include metadata that identify the Course Name, Course Code, and Language used in the course. This metadata is displayed in the IMSManifest.XML.

From the course selector, open the BCE course offering.
In the Course Administration widget, click Manage Files.
Click the Inbox folder.
Click Upload to upload the CSV file listing the course offerings to the export process.
After the scheduled task runs, to download an exported course offering’s content package, click the Outbox folder and then click the name of the zip file containing the course offering’s components. You will encounter an error if one or more course offerings are not exported.

Sample Log File for BCE

Bulk Course Create Export generates logs only if an input file is processed.

Below is an example of a BCE log file showing the successful export of a course offering. In this block, you can see that a ZIP package for the specified course offering with the Org Unit ID 7331 was successfully created.


			INFO  2023-05-18 04:00:05 - Started processing files for organization with id '6606'.
			INFO  2023-05-18 04:00:05 - Started processing file '[org: 6606; location: \\fs-LVU\LVU\web\content\LVU\BulkTools\BCE\Inbox\Sample BCE.csv]'
			INFO  2023-05-18 04:00:05 – Started processing line with number '1' for 'Sample BCE.csv'
			INFO  2023-05-18 04:00:05 – Started parsing line '12345,Grammar 1001,Grammar_1001'
			INFO  2023-05-18 04:02:35 – Finished parsing line '12345,Grammar 1001,Grammar_1001' line
			INFO  2023-05-18 04:02:35 – Finished processing line number ‘1’ for 'Sample BCE.csv'
			INFO  2023-05-18 04:02:35 –
			INFO  2023-05-18 04:02:35 – Finished processing file '[org: 6606; location: \\fs-LVU\LVU\web\content\LVU\BulkTools\BCE\Inbox\Sample BCE.csv]'
			INFO  2023-05-18 04:02:35 – Finished processing files for organization with id '6606'.