In our continued effort to improve service, we have once again taken all of our user feedback to make some major changes to the Schoology system:

Basic and Topic Formats Have Been Combined

After receiving a number of requests to eliminate the confusion between “Basic” and “Topic” format courses, we have combined the two formats so you no longer need to choose a format. We found that teachers liked the structure that topics provided, but liked the flexibility of easily creating content from within the “Basic” format.  As a result we have merged the two formats to make everyone’s life a little bit easier.

All courses now have an “Materials” tab, where Topics, Assignments, Events, Documents, Pages, and Discussions can all be created and are automatically organized.

Teachers can quickly create any type of course content (Topics, Assignments, Events, Documents, Pages, Discussions) using the “Create Content” button in the materials tab. Assignments, Events, Documents, Pages, and Discussions can all be created independent of topics or within topics. This allows you to freely create the content you want without having to make any setup decisions.

Creating Topics Has Been Simplified

Instead of having you choose between a simple…

We have spent the past few weeks developing the ability for teachers to manage courses through a topic based format. This is a major change to the Schoology system and we are excited to announce its release!

Teachers can now choose between a basic format or topic based format for their course. The basic format is the default setting that organizes assignments, documents and pages into a ‘Materials’ tab. For a topic based format, this tab is replaced with a ‘Topics’ tab. Assignments, documents and pages are now created within a topic along with events and discussion threads

Creating a Topic

When creating a topic, users can choose to create a ‘Simple Topic’ or an ‘Advanced Topic.’ A simple topic has a standard format which consists of a description field followed by any assignments, documents, pages, events or discussion threads that have been added to the topic.

An advanced topic has a rich-text editor that allows users to fully customize the content and place assignments, documents, pages, events or discussion threads directly inline with the text.

Changes to be aware of

If you change a pre-existing course’s format, there are changes that you will need to be aware of. When…

Over the past couple months we have been working hard to make it as simple as possible for new users to get their schools setup and running on Schoology. During this process, we created some great tools for school administrators allowing them to fully customize the system to meet their needs. We have also built great new features for teachers to make their lives even easier.

New Administrative Controls

• School administrators can now customize user roles and turn on/off any feature on the site based on role
• A new ‘Users’ area has been created allowing admins to bulk edit all users within their system
• Import/Export capabilities are now available for courses, enrollments and users (supports CSV or XLS file types)
• The user activation area now allows admins to print activation information for students by course
• There is now a district interface for district admins to control/create multiple schools
• Single Sign On is now available for school admins to setup on their own following the instructions provided in the ‘Integration’ area
• Usernames can now be set for each user

Other New Features

• Teachers can now reuse old assignments, events, documents and gradebook settings using the ‘Import

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