Each piece of data in Pearson’s LMS that is linked to data in your SIS will have an “External ID” in the LMS. This includes classes, teachers, students, enrollments, and even your school’s subdomain. Almost all these External IDs will be automatically filled in by the integration and will be used by the integration to ensure that the information stays up to date between the LMS and your SIS. Thus, these IDs should be unique and should not change during the school year.
Course ID best practices
When filling out the mapping spreadsheet given to you by your DSP, use the IDs that will be included in the data from your SIS. This may require pulling a report from your SIS depending on how your SIS stores IDs. Ensuring that the IDs you put into the mapping spreadsheet match what’s in the SIS will also help to identify possible data issues even before the integration process is at the point of working with your actual data.
Additionally, each course ID must be unique within the school year. To align with Pearson’s content, this means that first semester courses cannot have the same course ID as second semester courses of the same content.
Examples of mapped courses with good IDs
Course IDs with school year and semester
| Pearson District Course ID | Pearson Course Title | SIS Master Course ID | SIS Master Course Title |
| 29617501 | Algebra 1 A (CL); MD; 7.21 | 2023-345-100S1 | Blended Algebra 1 |
| 29636235 | Algebra 1 B (CL); MD; 7.21 | 2023-345-100S2 | Blended Algebra 1 |
| 29617507 | Biology A | 2023-345-101S1 | Blended Biology |
| 29637414 | Biology A | 2023-345-101S2 | Blended Biology |
| 29637423 | English 11 A (CL); MD; 7.21 | 2023-345-103S1 | Blended English 11 |
| 29617516 | English 11 B (CL); MD; 7.21 | 2023-345-103S2 | Blended English 11 |
Course IDs with semester information:
| Pearson District Course ID | Pearson Course Title | SIS Master Course ID | SIS Master Course Title |
| 27823668 | Biology A | BioSem1 | Biology Sem 1 |
| 27823669 | Biology B | BioSem2 | Biology Sem 2 |
| 27823660 | Chemistry A | ChemistrySem1 | Chemistry Sem 1 |
| 27823666 | Chemistry B | ChemistrySem2 | Chemistry Sem 2 |
| 26469388 | Earth Science A, 10.20, N | EarthSciSem1 | Earth Sciences Sem 1 |
| 26469393 | Earth Science B, 10.20, N | EarthSciSem2 | Earth Sciences Sem 2 |
Course IDs with student grade level and A/B distinction
| Pearson District Course ID | Pearson Course Title | SIS Master Course ID | SIS Master Course Title | SIS Grade Level |
| 29568475 | Math 1 A (CL); 5.18; D | MATH1A | Math Content 1A | 1 |
| 29568476 | Math 1 B (CL); 5.18; D | MATH1B | Math Content 1B | 1 |
| 29568477 | Math 2 A (CL); 5.18; D | MATH2A | Math Content 2A | 2 |
| 29568478 | Math 2 B (CL); 5.18; D | MATH2B | Math Content 2B | 2 |
| 29568536 | Art 6 A (CL); 5.18; P | ART6A | Art 6A | 6 |
| 29568537 | Art 6 B (CL); 5.18; P | ART6B | Art 6B | 6 |
Best practices for other IDs
While only the course IDs go through a manual mapping process, other data in your SIS may cause unexpected behavior in the integration. It’s always a good idea to verify that best practices like the ones below are being followed while managing data on your end and to check in regularly with any questions on how your data management may impact the integration.
Classes/Sections
In some SIS setups, the class or section ID includes the course ID with some additional data. For example, if a course ID is ENG9A, the section ID may be ENG9A-1. That helps to keep IDs unique over the course of the semester or school year, but it may prevent enrollments from syncing correctly if the same ID is used again in a future semester or school year.
A good class/section ID
- Is unique within the SIS
- Contains information that identifies the school year or other information that won’t be reused by a future iteration of the class
- Why this is important: If your class ID contains the school year, that class ID will be unique from past and future classes. This helps the integration to clearly differentiate between classes in different school years and enroll teachers and students in the correct class.
- Is the school year required in the class ID? No. However, depending on how your IDs are structured, not having it does increase the chance of data mismatches in the future.
- For example, if you have a class with ID ENG9A-1 taught by Ms. Smith in school year 22-23 and then Ms. Smith teaches ENG9A-1 again in school year 23-24, the integration may see that Ms. Smith already is enrolled in ENG9A-1 and won’t add her to the new 23-24 class.
- Doesn’t contain information that may change during the school year
- Why this is important: If your class ID contains information that changes, the integration will see the new ID as a different class entirely. This will result in a new class created in the LMS and any students being enrolled in the new class and dropped from the old one.
- Examples of data that may change and shouldn’t be included in the class ID are things like class period and teacher name
Users (students and teachers)
The integration will update the name of a student or teacher as long as the External ID matches the user’s ID in the SIS. This can be useful when a student or teacher has a name change for any reason since it means that change only has to be made once in the SIS.
However, this also means that the ID number used in the SIS should not be reused for a different student or teacher in the future. For example, if Student A with ID “S101” graduates and a new student, Student B, is assigned the ID “S101”, the integration will find the “S101” account in the LMS and change the name from Student A to Student B.