Bulk Enrollment of Peer Connection Account Members
When working with Peer Connection's Account management pages, it is often easier to upload a file of teachers, professional developers, and administrators rather than entering in each member's information manually. Peer Connection allows you to upload a file in Comma-Separated Values (CSV) format to easily enroll many members into an Account.
To prepare your CSV file, first download the sample CSV file from the Enroll Members page. This CSV file shows the basic formatting. You can open the CSV file in any spreadsheet editor, such as Microsoft Excel, Open Office Calc, or Google Docs Spreadsheet. You will see a header column that shows the different forms of information. The only required information is the email and role for each user. You may leave all of the other columns blank if you prefer. (Note: If you choose to leave non-required columns blank, then you will not be able to see the names or phone numbers of members who have not yet accepted their reservations in the Account Management screens. This may or may not be a hindrance to conducting your business.)
When enrolling Members, you must refer to the roles in a controlled way. We use all-lowercase shorthand versions of the roles to make this easier. The following list defines how to refer to the roles in a spreadsheet:
- Account Admin role is indicated by: admin
- Professional Developer role is indicated by: pd
- Member role is indicated by: member
Once you have populated your spreadsheet with the proper data, you can save it as a CSV file (use the File>Save As function in most spreadsheet editors). Return to the Peer Connection Enroll Members page and upload your CSV file. The system will process all of the enrollments it can and then alert you to any problematic enrollments.
The most common cause of problematic enrollments is the lack of a required field. Remember, email address and role are required for each new Member. Another common cause of problematic enrollments is when Admins try to enroll Members with a role that has been controlled by PBS TeacherLine. Remember that your Peer Connection Account is limited to a certain number of participants with each role. For example, you may only be allowed to have X number of Professional Developers in your Account. If you try to enroll more than that limited number of Members with that role, then you will get an error. The easiest solution is to set the problematic enrollments to be another role (such as Member) and then contact your TeacherLine representative or adjust your Member rosters.
After the enrollment has been processed, Reservations are created for each new Member. Members are not officially added to the Account until they accept their Reservation. Therefore, if a Member's Reservation is still pending you will not see them in the lists of Members in your Network pages, and you will not be able to send them a Suggestion or set them as the owner of a Group.