M34 - Bulk enrolments

What is it?

Bulk enrolments allows you to enrol students or staff and add them to groups in a Moodle course using an excel file containing their UCL email address or userid. 

This can be useful before the start of session, when Portico enrolments may not yet have begun, but enrolments are required.  It also allows you to add students to groups with ease - the process will auto-create a groups if they do not already exist on your Moodle course.

Who can use it?

Course administrators and tutors can use this feature.

Before I start...

You will require an excel file containing a complete list of the students' email address or userids in the first column. Subsequent columns contain the names of any groups you want to add each student to. 

How do I use it?

1. Create your CSV

In order to upload users successfully, you will need to create a CSV file with the students details. If you also want to enrol staff you will need to create a second csv file for this, as each bulk enrolment can only enrol a single type of role (e.g. either students or tutors).

CSVs are simple to create - one way is in a spreadsheet package like Excel, making sure to save it as a .csv file-type.

At minimum, your CSV file should contain one column for the main student identifier, usually their UCL email address, but it can also be their UCL userid.
Ensure you have column labels - this is because Moodle anticipates these and so ignores the first row of CSV file. In other words, don't put any actual student data in your file's top row. If you are using Email then put 'email', if you are using user IDs then put 'userid'
If you want to enrol the students into Groups, include a second column which gives the group name for each student. Be careful to type these exactly. Give it a column heading 'group'.

       2.  Enrol the Students

In the Settings block on your course, under Course administration, click Users > Bulk enrolments.

1. Select Choose a file and upload your CSV file.
2. Make sure Role to assign is left as student or tutor (if uploading staff).
3. Set First column contains to reflect they type of data you have used in your spreadsheet, either the students' email address or UCL userid.
4.  If you need to create groups, ensure Create group(s) if needed is set to Yes
5. If you would like to create groupings in your course, based on the groups that the students will been placed into, ensure Create grouping(s) if needed is kept to yes.  If you do not want to create groupings, ensure this is set to No
6. To receive an email report confirming which students have been enrolled and which groups they have been placed into, keep Send me a mail report set to Yes.
7. Click Enrol them to my course.
8. Check the students have been enrolled in their groups by going to the Settings menu and under Course Administration click on Users then Groups.
9. You should see the groups listed, followed by the number of students in each group in brackets.

You can also bulk unenrol students from your course by clicking on Bulk unenrolments in the block, and following the instructions above.

Caution

The students you are enrolling must have already logged into Moodle, so this cannot be used to enrol first year students if they had never used Moodle.

Also, note the bulk unenrolment will not work for students who have been enrolled onto the course via Portico.  

Examples and case studies

Uploading students and their personal tutors to a departmental Personal Tutoring Moodle course

Questions & Answers

Q.  I am getting an error message when I upload the CSV file to Moodle?

A.  Check the file is a .csv and not a .xls file, and ensure in the First column contains field is set to UCL Userid or Email address

Further information

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