Importing Users

Import users into your school from the Users tab on the Import page.

Note: Schoology is optimized to process imports and exports (auto or manual) most quickly between the hours of 7pm to 6am Eastern Time (ET) from Monday to Sunday. Imports or exports that are run outside of this window will be slower to complete. Schoology strongly recommends performing or scheduling all imports, exports, and bulk deletions during this time frame, including manual imports as well as scheduled auto-imports, for optimal performance.

Step 1—Select File

The XLS or CSV file for import must contain the following columns:

First Name
Last Name
Username or E-mail address
User Unique ID

Additionally:

Role is a required column if you select Use Import File in the Roles drop-down menu.
School is a required column if you select Use Import File in the Schools drop-down menu.

These additional columns are not required, but are available for import files:

First Name (Preferred)
Middle Name
Name Prefix
Position/Job Title
User Unique ID*
Password
Gender
Grad Year
Additional Schools

Note: Schoology recommends that you include the graduation year when you import users.

Note: Review the Unique ID section in Edit Users for more information.

If you do not include passwords in the file, Schoology will automatically generate a password for the user. As a System Admin, you can view the password in Edit Users once the import is complete.

If you’d like a way to more easily manage groups of students in the system, we recommend including the Grad Year column in the file. Including this column will allow you to associate users with a particular graduation year, which you may export and filter as needed for subsequent school years.

Roles

Use the Roles drop-down menu to assign Schoology roles to the users in your file. If your spreadsheet only has users assigned to a single role, you can select that role in the menu. For example, if the spreadsheet only has students, select Student in the menu.

If, however, your spreadsheet has users who will be assigned different roles in Schoology, select Use Import File in the menu. The Schoology roles display in the left column; enter the equivalent role from your spreadsheet in the fields in the CSV Value column.

In this example, users in the spreadsheet assigned the roles of Parent or Student are assigned those same roles in Schoology; users designated as Administrator and Educator are given the School Admin and Teacher roles, respectively.

Note: With an Enterprise account you can add custom roles. To add additional roles to your school, please refer to the Roles section in Edit Users.

Schools

Follow the same process for the Schools menu as for Roles – if you are adding all users in the spreadsheet to one school in Schoology, select that school in the menu.

If different users are in different schools, select Use Import File in the menu. The schools in your Schoology account display in the left column; enter the equivalent school from your spreadsheet in the fields in the CSV Value column.

In this example, users in the spreadsheet associated with school 161802 are added to Wells Road Academy in Schoology, while users associated with school 279616 and 366884 are added to ST2 and ST7, respectively.

Preferred Name

If you include preferred name columns in the import files, select whether to display the preferred name in place of, or in addition to, the user first names.

Select Override existing settings in Schoology to replace the current user setting in Schoology with the selection from the Preferred Name Display area.

Note: In order to use the Override existing settings in Schoology option for the Existing Preferred Name Display setting, you must choose one of the Update existing records options in the following section.

Update existing records

Use the Updating section to locate existing users and update new information from the XLS or CSV file. You can update existing users in one of two ways:

User Unique ID– A value created by your organization outside of Schoology. This is usually tied to your Student Information System (SIS).
Schoology User ID – A value assigned to users in Schoology.

You can also choose to not update existing records.

Importing an empty column will not remove information from Schoology. For example, if you import a file with no Grad Year information, existing Grad Year information is not removed from Schoology upon import.

Email Conflicts

User accounts with e-mail addresses must have a unique e-mail address. For example, if john@schoology.com exists in School 1, this same email address cannot be associated with a user account in School 2. In the case that a user has created an account using an e-mail address listed in your file, you must decide how you’d like Schoology to handle account-creation. You have two options:

Don’t allow duplicates—If jsmith@gmail.com already exists in the system (either at your school, or as an individual account), selecting this option will not create another account in Schoology.
Create account with Username—If jsmith@gmail.com already exists in the system (either at your school, or at another school), selecting this option will create an account with the e-mail prefix, “jsmith” as the username. If your XLS or CSV file already specifies a username (e.g. johnsmith), an account will be created using the specified username.

Select File

Please select the XLS or CSV file that contains the user information for import. This file usually comes from your organization’s database.

Send activation email

Selecting this option will send login instructions to users created with an email address.

Step 2—Match Columns

In the second step of the import process, match the information from a Schoology Field to each column in the spreadsheet to create user accounts in Schoology.

Confirm the match by verifying the Preview columns list the correct information.

Step 3—Preview/Confirm

New users are indicated by an orange label, new. If a yellow message displays at the top of the screen, note the message in relation to the options you chose in Step 1, and if needed, adjust your import file. If all information appears correct, click Run to complete the import process.