Note: The below describes our limited-access content delivery platform for early adopters. If you are not an early adopter, please see the section on CourseCloud Legacy.

All CourseCloud emails, including account invitations, are sent from noreply@coursecloud.opensesame.com. As a best practice, before creating user accounts please confirm with your IT team that messages from this address are allowed.

For your learners, a PDF guide to getting started, launching courses, and following a Learning Path can be found here.

In this article:

• Create an individual user account
• Create multiple user accounts at once
• Resend an individual user's login details

Create an individual user account

When creating a small number of CourseCloud user accounts, whether for Learners or Learning Admins, it can be easier to create them individually rather than use the bulk upload option.

While logged in to your Learning Administrator account, select Admin Tools at left and then the Users tab:

From there select Create user:

The new user will automatically appear under your organization’s name. The only three required fields are first name, last name, and email address. The user’s email address must be entered entirely in lowercase:

If you wish, you can manually enter a temporary password, which the user will receive via email. If this field is left blank, CourseCloud will automatically generate their temporary password:

Note: All users must change their password when they log in for the first time.

Below that field is an option to schedule when CourseCloud will send this user their invitation email. If you have not set your preferred time zone in your account profile, this tool will use the default time zone (Pacific). If these date and time fields are left as-is, or accidentally set to a date in the past, the invitation will send as soon as the form is submitted:

The invitation email will contain the user’s unique CourseCloud username, temporary password, and a link for logging in. (If they accidentally delete their invitation or report they haven’t received it, you can send another email via the Edit users tools.)

Click the Advanced arrow to expand the next section:

Here you can adjust the user’s department and their role type. By default, any new user will appear under your organization’s parent department and will have the Learner role:

To add the user to a more specific department, click the parent department’s arrow to view the available sub-departments then select one:

Note: Users can only be assigned to one department with this form. To add a user to multiple departments, either update an existing user account or use the bulk user creation tool. To adjust the departments themselves, please see this section.

To upgrade the user’s role, select Role to assign and choose Learning Admin:

Finally, you can expand the Assign courses section to assign the user training regardless of their Role type:

Only courses that have already been imported to CourseCloud will appear here. Assignments can also be made at any time with the User Enrollment tool.

Once you are satisfied with the new user’s settings, save your work by clicking either Submit and create another user, which will clear the form, or Submit and back to dashboard, if you have no further users to create:

If you have many more users to create, consider using the bulk upload tool, which is covered in the next section.

 

Create multiple user accounts at once

To create CourseCloud user accounts in bulk, you will need to add the users’ account information to a specific spreadsheet template and then upload that data to CourseCloud as a CSV file. And while CourseCloud will accept CSV files up to 256 MB in size, if you have a large learner population we recommend working in batches of 5,000 users at a time to keep processing times swift.

First, locate the template provided by your Customer Success Manager or Implementation Specialist. (You can also download it here.) It will look similar to this:

Each user should occupy their own row. For each person, add their first name, last name, and email address to the first columns. These three details are required for all user accounts, and the email addresses must be entered entirely in lowercase.

All of the remaining columns are optional:

• The fourth column can be used to assign each user a specific temporary password. If it is blank, CourseCloud will automatically generate the temporary passwords. (For greater security, all users are prompted to reset their password when they first log in.)
• If you’ve already created a department hierarchy in CourseCloud, the next columns allow you to add users to one or more departments. Be sure to use each department’s long name as it was created in CourseCloud, as the shorthand name will not be recognized.
  • If you haven’t yet created departments in CourseCloud, it will not yet be possible to add users to them. You can update these user accounts in bulk later, after the departments are created.
  • If your hierarchy is in place and some users belong to more than three departments, you can insert additional columns to the right of “department2” and label them in the same pattern (department3, department4, etc.).
• The suspended column can be ignored for now, as these will be brand-new accounts. When this column is left blank, CourseCloud will assume the default (unsuspended). The values for this column are either 1 (suspended) or 0 (unsuspended).
• The city and country columns allow you to add the user’s region. This will not be visible to anyone in your organization aside from the user and other Learning Admins, and it will not impact the time zone of the user’s account. Users can update their profile to add or change this information later, if they wish.
  • Note that leaving these columns blank will overwrite any details that had previously been added to these fields.

Once you are satisfied with your spreadsheet, save it as a CSV file and then log in to CourseCloud. (While spreadsheet tools vary, the option to choose a file type usually appears in the menu under either Save As or Download.)

When logged in, select Admin Tools at left and then the Users tab:

Click Upload users:

On the next page, select your CSV file by either clicking the Choose a file button or dragging and dropping your file into the outlined box:

The next two options are for advanced Learning Admins and are rarely changed from their default values:

• CSV delimiter allows you to select a different separator type than the standard comma (;, :, or \t).
• Encoding allows you to use different character encoding than UTF-8.

The final two options are relevant to all Learning Admins:

• Preview rows determines up to how many preview lines will be displayed on the next page.
• Upload type tells CourseCloud what to do with the data in your spreadsheet.
  • For an initial upload, select Add new only, skip existing users. With this option, if you have already created a few user accounts and any of those users appear in your CSV, CourseCloud will ignore those CSV entries rather than update existing accounts. 

Once the CSV file is selected and you are satisfied with your settings, click the Upload users button:

You will then see a preview of the new user accounts as well as additional settings. This example uses the Add new only, skip existing users option, so any settings that only apply when updating existing accounts are grayed out:

Here are the available settings for this type of upload:

• Upload type reports the type selected on the previous screen and cannot be edited from here.
• New user password can be set to either auto-generate a password or require you to supply passwords in your CSV.
• Send temporary passwords by email will almost always be set to Yes, as it is not possible to resend user passwords in bulk. No should only be selected if you have assigned each user a specific temporary password in your CSV and will be contacting each of them individually.
• Select for bulk user actions allows you to indicate which users should be affected:
  • No is the default.
  • New users should be selected when you only want to create new accounts.
  • Updated users should be selected when you only want to update existing accounts.
  • All users should be selected when you want all the data in your CSV to be applied to CourseCloud.

Next, if you have already added training to CourseCloud, you can enroll each of these users into a specific course. Once satisfied with your settings, click the Upload users button:

A Results page will outline the accounts that were created. If any of the CSV’s entries resulted in an error, that information will appear as well.

Finally, click the Continue button to return to the Upload users page.

 

Resend an individual user's login details

Note: It is not currently possible to resend account login details in bulk.

If a user forgets their CourseCloud login information, accidentally deletes their invitation email, or they report that they never received one (and do not find it in their email account’s spam folder), you can resend their login details via the Edit Users tools. (If many users report this issue, please double-check with your IT team that messages from noreply@coursecloud.opensesame.com are allowed.)

While the new email won’t be an identical copy of the user’s original invitation, it will provide the same essential details: their unique CourseCloud username, a temporary password, and a link for logging in.

Note that resending a user’s details will reset their password. So if they find their invitation later, the earlier password it contains will no longer work.

When logged in, select Admin Tools at left and then the Users tab:

Click Edit Users:

Use the search tools and locate your target user in the table of results. Next, click their User controls button at right and select Resend user details:

Resending a user’s details will reset their password, so you will be asked to confirm the action. Click the Continue button to proceed:

This will send an email to the address on file and return you to the search tools.

The default email message will look like the example below, and you can customize these templates if you wish:

If the user does not see their email appear within 10 minutes, they have checked their spam folder, and your IT team has confirmed that messages from noreply@coursecloud.opensesame.com are allowed, as a final troubleshooting step please double-check the email address for any typos. If their address in CourseCloud is correct, contact our Support team for further assistance.

 

If you have further questions, our Support team is here to help via email at support@opensesame.com or via live chat and phone. Feel free to reach us at (503) 808-1268, ext. 2, or at +44 203 744 5541 in Europe.