Admin Basics 10 Course groups Admin Basics
Admin Basics 10 Course groups Admin Basics
How can I add groups to my courses?
First let's look at two Moodle terms for groups of users. A cohort is a group of users created by the admin and available throughout the site or a category. You can enrol a cohort into a course. When users are added to or removed from a cohort they will appear or disappear in the course where they're enrolled. A group as Moodle uses the term only exists within a single course. A course can have several groups and the teacher can create these manually or the admin can upload them with a file. This video looks at groups in courses. If you need to create cohorts watch our video on How can I add groups of users to my Moodle?
Groups can be added to courses either by the administrator with the text CSV file upload or by the course teacher within the course. Let's look at both methods.
File upload by the admin: If you're the admin you can create groups in a course and enrol students in them at the same time by including the relevant columns or fields in your file. First we need to prepare our file offline; we can either use a simple text editor such as Notepad or Gedit or use spreadsheet program such as Excel or LibreOffice calc. If you can use a simple text editor it's better because sometimes saving in Excel can cause problems. Here is an example of a text file which shows the username course name and groups. You need the short name of the course and if the group has not been created in the course it will be created when the file is uploaded. Our users already exist on the system. We make sure the file is saved as a CSV file and then upload it from Site administration / Users/Upload users. Here we preview the file and can check certain settings - then when we upload it the groups are created and the students enrolled into them.
Manual group creation in a course: As admin or the course teacher access the course and click the Participants link on the left then from the cog icon click Groups. Click the Create groups button. If you're interested in the other two options Auto create and Import, find out more in the documentation. Here we must give the group a name but other settings are optional. If we need learners to enrol themselves into the group we can set an
enrolment key and tell it to the learners. The documentation explains more. We can also add a group picture which identifies the group in forums. Then to manually add learners we select the from the box on the left and move them into the box on the right. We can go back to the groups and repeat the process to add more groups, and here the Participants list shows who is in which group.
To summarise:
• Moodle groups users in two ways: site or category wide cohorts, and course groups.
• Groups can be created and uploaded into courses by the site admin
• Groups can be manually created in courses.
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