Schoology Mapping Notes

Usage Notes

The Schoology API is well designed for resource discovery and access to hierarchical data. For example, to retrieve assignment submissions:

1. Query for all courses (https://api.schoology.com/v1/courses)
2. For each course:
   1. Query for all sections (https://api.schoology.com/v1/courses/{course\_id}/sections)
   2. For each section:
      1. Query for all assignments (https://api.schoology.com/v1/sections/{section\_id}/assignments)
      2. For each assignment, which has a grade_item_id:
         1. Query for all submissions (https://api.schoology.com/v1/sections/{section\_id}/submissions/{grade\_item\_id}/)

This is very logical - and makes it a chatty interface. Thus the overall processing requires a considerable number of API calls. Furthermore, there are no tools for querying by date range or by create / modified date. Thus users of the Schoology Extractor may want to consider running during off hours rather than during school hours, and should consider carefully the frequency of data pulls, which are retrieving all available records every time the extractor runs.

Resource Mapping

Schoology Resource	Data Model Entity	Business Logic Notes
User	Users	Includes both students and staff
Course Section	Sections	Includes all sections that are in a currently-active Grading Period
Assignment	Assignments	There is a bug in the Schoology API which causes the Description  field to be blank in all requests for Assignment data. Thus this column will always be blank in the output CSV files.
Submissions + Grade	Submissions	The initial software release will not include the assignment grades
Discussion Thread in the "Section" realm	Section Activities Assignment	Discussions that are marked for grading are cross-listed in both the Section Activities and Assignments outputs
Discussion Reply in the "Section" realm	Section Activities Submissions	Replies on "graded discussions" are cross-listed in both the Section Activities and Submissions outputs
Updates in the "Section" realm	Section Activities
Update Comment in the "Section" realm	Section Activities
Attendance	Attendance Events
Grades	Grades	The initial software release will not include these section grades
Discussion Thread in the "Groups" realm	System Activities
Discussion Reply in the "Groups" realm	System Activities
Updates in the "Groups" realm	System Activities
Update Comment in the "Groups" realm	System Activities
Enrollment	Section Associations
Usage Analytics*	System Activities	Reports on the "Login success" and "Logout" actions from the usage analytics report

Retrieving Usage Analytics

* Because of the lack of API support, the Usage Analytics processing requires manual steps by the system administrator:

1. Sign-in to Schoology as an administrator
2. Click on the Tools menu and then "Usage Analytics"
3. Click the Actions button in the upper right quadrant of the screen, and choose Export Report
4. Follow the prompts to generate an e-mailed report link
5. Once the e-mail is received, save the downloaded file into an input directory
6. Configure the Schoology Extractor to read from that input directory.

Schoology Enumerations

The following enumerations and value sets for Schoology are based on the Schoology API documentation. Note that user roles in Schoology are stored in a configurable attribute, Role.title so there are no static system values.

Reference to Google Classroom API

Enumeration	System Values	Equivalent LMS UDM Attribute
enrollments.status	1: Active 2: Expired 3: Invite pending 4: Requrest Pending * 5: Archived	LMSUserLMSSectionAssociation.EnrollmentStatus
assignments.type	assignment discussion * assessment	Assignment.AssignmentCategory
assignments.comments.status	0: deleted 1: available * 2: pending moderation approval	LMSUserActivity.ActivityStatus
attendance.status	1: present 2: absent 3: late 4: excused	LMSUserAttendanceEvent.AttendanceStatus

Mappings to ODS Tables

Object	Schoology API elements	ODS Column
User	user.school_uid	edfi.Student.StudentUniqueId
Section	section.section_school_code	edfi.Section.SectionIdentifier
Assignment	assignment.id	lmsx.Assignment.AssignmentIdentifier
	"Schoology"	lmsx.Assignment.LMSSourceSystemDescriptorId
	assignment.title	lmsx.Assignment.Title
	assignment.type	lmsx.Assignment.AssignmentCategoryDescriptorId
	assignment.description	lmsx.Assignment.AssignmentDescription
	None	lmsx.Assignment.StartDateTime
	None	lmsx.Assignment.EndDateTime
	assignment.due	lmsx.Assignment.DueDateTime
	assignment.max_points	lmsx.Assignment.MaxPoints
Submission	submission.id + assignment.id + section.id + user.id	lmsx.AssignmentSubmission.AssignmentSubmissionIdentifier
	submission.late + submission.draft + submission.due	lmsx.AssignmentSubmission.SubmissionStatusDescriptorId
	submission.created	lmsx.AssignmentSubmission.SubmissionDateTime
	None	lmsx.AssignmentSubmission.EarnedPoints
	None	lmsx.AssignmentSubmission.Grade