Infinite Campus data integration with Qualtrics

PowerSchool user here, but we move our data from SIS →  student data warehouse → Qualtrics using two different automation scripts. 

Did your IT department set up automation scripts? We have sort of a data warehouse that we use for Tableau but we also have a SQL Server replication read only database. 

I set up the automations, but you could definitely leverage a direct query of your replicated SIS DB or your Tableau DB to feed Qualtrics.

I guess I am confused by the term automation. By automation do you mean Qualtrics automation to pull data from your student data warehouse directly or automated SQL jobs/packages to drop csv files on an SFTP server where Qualtrics imports data from? 

We push the data into Qualtrics using the surveys API; the automation pulls all our key student metrics out of our DB and then uploads that data into Qualtrics as survey responses.  Our dashboards then live on top of that survey. 

Do you have snowflake as your data warehouse? From what I am reading online, it looks like Qualtrics automation allows a direct connection to snowflake but not a SQL Server database. 

We have a SQL-based solution for our warehouse.

When you set up Qualtrics automation to import data, are you able to set up a connection to pull data directly from your SQL data warehouse? 

Not that I’m aware of; we wrote up some Python code that pulls the data from our SQL database and then pushes it into Qualtrics via the Survey API.

I am not sure if this is what you are asking, but in my previous district I set up an “automated task” that sent our students to a directory and our staff to a separate directory. We included demographic data as embedded data fields. This allowed for authentication when completing surveys and allowed us to use the demographics in dashboards. 

We did this via an SFTP server (at that time an automation) but would now need to be a workflow. 
Currently, I am at an Educational Service Center, so we only have employee data from our Employee Management System to Qualtrics, but again via an SFTP. 

This is exactly what I am looking for. We want to send student demographics and other data like assessments from Infinite Campus to Qualtrics for surveys and dashboards. I want to know about the SIS side of the process - How did you extract and transfer data from your SIS to the SFTP server? Did you have any SQL jobs/packages that did this? 

​@NeelamS In the SIS we used, we were able to build an export and schedule a task. That particular SIS, you could data mine to build reports. We built the report, then we scheduled a task, so every night at the specified time it sends the file to the SFTP server. I set the automation from Qualtrics to grab that file 2 hours after the task ran. We did not have to use SQL or API. 
In my current org, our system we have less flexibility, but we can still choose the fields that we want to export and then it auto sends the file. I guess the process of data mining and scheduling the task is essentially setting up an API, but the SIS vendors make it so simple for us that aren’t programmers. Let me know if you need me to expand more. 

For reference the two systems I am referencing are Skyward Qmlativ and Ascender

​@KathyM Thank you! This is very helpful. I will check if Infinite Campus has this kind of capability to schedule data export tasks.