Course Ingestion

Torus supports importing, or ingesting, externally developed course material.

Overview

The Torus ingestion feature takes as input a course digest archive and converts that into a course project.

Course digest archives can be produced from a variety of different sources, either manually or via automated tools.

There is an automated tool that produces course digest archives from the legacy OLI XML course format.

https://github.com/Simon-Initiative/course-digest

Course Digest Format

Course digest archives are zip files that contain JSON files corresponding to curriculum resources.

In a course digest, the following are the minimally required files:

_project.json

This file describes high level course meta data.

{
  "slug": "edx_bio_1",
  "title": "Introduction to Biology",
  "description": "An introductory biology course suitable for non-majors",
  "type": "Manifest"
}

_hierarchy_.json

This file describes the course outline, or hierarchy, defining the units and modules of a course and the pages that they contain. The following is an excerpt of a sample hierarchy file:

{
  "type": "Hierarchy",
  "children": [
    {
      "type": "container",
      "children": [
        {
          "type": "container",
          "children": [
            {
              "type": "item",
              "children": [],
              "idref": "u-introduction-m-introduction-p-welcome"
            }
          ],
          "id": "u-introduction-m-introduction",
          "title": "Introduction"
        },
        {
          "type": "container",
          "children": [
            {
              "type": "item",

The hierarchy file is essential a nested collection of children, that are of either type "container" (to represent a unit or module) or of type "item" (to represent a page reference). For "item" instances, the idref attribute is a reference to the id attribute of resource JSON file.

_media-manifest_.json

This file is a listing of all media assets that this course has prestaged into Torus S3 storage.

{
  "mediaItems": [
    {
      "name": "1x1.png",
      "url": "https://torus-media-dev.s3.amazonaws.com/media/nothingatall/1x1.png",
      "fileSize": 95,
      "mimeType": "image/png",
      "md5": "71a50dbba44c78128b221b7df7bb51f1"
    },
    {
      "name": "code-variable.png",
      "url": "https://torus-media-dev.s3.amazonaws.com/media/nothingatall/code-variable.png",
      "fileSize": 3671,
      "mimeType": "image/png",
      "md5": "0c084906e4502a6e93739b20a4ac119f"
    },

Resource Files

Beyond the three require metadata files, a course digest archive also contains any number of resource specific JSON files. These files must be named <id>.json where the id is the string identifier used to reference the resource from idref attributes in the course hierarchy file.

Currently three types of resource files are supported for ingestion: Page, Activity, and Objective. All three follow the same format of requiring type, id, title, content and objectives attributes to be defined. Samples of each follow:

Learning Objective

{
  "type": "Objective",
  "id": "u-hardware_and_software-m-hardware_and_software-p-kilobytes_megabytes_and_gigabytes_LO_1",
  "title": "Solve word problems with arithmetic combinations of kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes.",
  "content": {},
  "objectives": []
}

Activity

{
  "type": "Activity",
  "id": "3550878268",
  "title": "Image coding activity",
  "tags": [],
  "content": {
    "authoring": {
      "parts": [
        {
          "id": "1",
          "responses": [
            {
              "id": "3713976972",
              "score": 1,
              "rule": "input like {1}",
              "feedback": {
                "id": "2848932877",
                "content": {
                  "id": "2564146359",
                  "model": [
                    {
                      "type": "p",
                      "children": [
                        {
                          "text": "Correct"
                        }
                      ]
                    }
                  ]

Page

{
  "type": "Page",
  "id": "u-security-m-contents_security-p-contents_security",
  "originalFile": "",
  "title": "Contents: Security",
  "tags": [],
  "unresolvedReferences": [],
  "content": {
    "model": [
      {
        "type": "content",
        "purpose": "none",
        "id": "3177050314",
        "children": [
          {
            "type": "ul",
            "children": [
              {
                "type": "li",
                "children": [
                  {
                    "text": " "
                  },
                  {