Exporting & Importing Group Memberships
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The obvious route for Importing Groups appears to be the User > Groups > Import Groups button
This option only allows for the importing of group definitions, not group membership.
Myplace provides 2 custom options below the Groups menu item:
Export Group Memberships
Import Group Memberships
Export Group memberships is available to all staff roles.
Import Group membership is only available to Module Administrators and Lecturer roles.
Exporting Group Memberships
The Export Group Membership page allows users to:
export the current membership of existing groups
export a blank group membership file, including all of the current class members.
Exporting a Blank Group membership file
Check the Export Blank/Class option
Choose an appropriate separator, CSV is default.
Click Export Group Membership.
Choose an appropriate location to save the file
You may now open the downloaded file in Excel or a text editor.
The file contains a number of fields:
userid - This is the internal Moodle ID of the user. Do not modify this value or separate from the other columns.
groupname - This is the name of the Group that you wish the student placed into. If it does not already exist a new group will be created. All students with the same group name will be placed into the same group.
firstname - The students' firstname
surname - The students' last name
email - The Students’ email address
phone2 - This is the students' Strathclyde Registration Number.
The userid and group name columns are vital for the import process. You must not modify or change userid. The other columns are provided for information only, and unexpected effects may arise if the userid is not related. This can happen if you choose to sort the file.
Once you have allocated all of the students to a group, and remove any students you do not wish to allocate, save the file ready for Importing.
Exporting Existing Groups
You can use the Grouping option to export the existing membership of the groups within the selected grouping.
This is useful if you wish to import the same memberships into another module’s Myplace site for consistent group membership.
Importing Group Membership
Select the Import Group Membership option:
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optional Choose a Grouping. This will influence the scope of groups in the site that are affected. If you are creating groups, they will be created in this grouping.
Selecting All Groups will use all of the groups in the Module Site, and new groups will not be placed into a grouping.Use the choose a file button to select a group membership file that you have either created or downloaded.
optional Select an Encoding. The default is UTF-8 and there is normally no requirement to change this unless you have changed the encoding of the membership file.
Select the same Separator as is used in the membership file. This will be Comma by default.
If you wish to create groups check the Create Groups (if they don’t exist) option.
If this is not selected group members will only be updated, and any user with an unknown group will not be added to a group.optional If you are updating groups within a Grouping, you may check Remove all members of groups first.
This will remove any existing members before adding the students in. If this is not selected only user who are not members of the group already will be added from the file.
Click on the Upload Group Members button.
The uploaded file will be checked for any issues, and summary displayed:
A number of warnings may be issued, you should review them and if necessary make changes.
This may include:Groups that do not exist already will be warned. This allows to identify an issue if you are expecting all of the groups to already exist.
A list of actions that will be performed is displayed. This confirms what will happen.
You can click on the Try Again button to return to the upload form if you have amendments to make.
Click on Import to perform all of the listed actions.
Click Yes to continue, or Cancel to Abandon the process.
At the moment, a cryptic response will be displayed as a result of the Import process:
This will change in the future.
Return to the Module’s Group Admin page and verify that the memberships are complete.