Importing Courses

The second tab in the Import area enables you to import courses into your school.

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 at least the following columns:

Course Name
Course Code
Section Name
Section Code or Section School Code
Grading Period

Course codes and Section School Codes must be unique within your entire school or district. Section codes must be unique across courses and grading periods.

For example, if you have a course section with the following codes in Grading Period 1:

Course Code: CC101
Section Code: SC101

You may also have another course section with the same course and section codes the following Grading Period 2. This system enables you to have the same classes in following years without duplicating courses listed in Course Listing.

School

If there is more than one school in your Schoology account (For example, Schoology District, Schoology High School, and Schoology Middle School), you’ll see a field for the School, into which you may import users. If you do not see this field in your import area, you can ignore this section.

The school designated in this field associates courses in your file to the selected school. Alternatively, you may add a School column in your file to associate courses to a particular school by selecting Use Import File.

Grading Period(s)

If you have selected Select Periods in the Grading Period(s) area of this screen, the grading periods listed are the grading periods you’ve created through System Settings > Grade Settings. The grading periods you select during this import associate the courses in the file to all selected grading periods.

Alternatively, you can select Use Import File to map values in your .CSV file to the Grading Periods you have created in Schoology through System Settings> Grade Settings.

A Note About Grading Periods and Sub-Periods

If you have sub-periods within any of your grading periods, you only need to map your .CSV file to the main grading period(s). For example, mapping your file to the year-long period automatically associates the course with all sub-periods such as semesters and quarters.

So, if your school's grading periods include one year-long grading period, with semester-long sub-periods, like this:

Then, in your import file, you can add only the year-long period:

And you can map the file only to the year-long grading period in the Import screen:

When you create the course, it associates with the year-long grading period AND the sub-periods:

Select File

Select the XLS or CSV file that contains the course information for import.

Update existing records

Selecting this option locates existing course sections by Course Code and Section Code/Section School Code, and updates new information from the XLS or CSV file. Importing an empty column does not remove information from Schoology. For example, importing a file with no course description does not remove existing course descriptions from Schoology.

Note: You cannot update a course's associated school and grading period via import. You must update schools and grading periods from Edit Users or update them manually from the course listing.

Step 2—Match Columns

In the second step of the import process, you can match the information listed in each column to create courses in Schoology.
If the first row of your XLS or CSV file contains headers, select First row contains headers.
Match each Schoology Field to a column in the XLS or CSV file.
Once you've matched each field to the appropriate column, click Preview for an overview of new courses and sections.

Step 3—Preview/Confirm

New courses and sections display under Created Courses and any courses you're updating display under Updated Courses. Adjust courses under the Errors heading according to their error message. Click Run to complete the import process when all information appears correct.