Bulk upload of users

Having previously tried to upload a batch of users with no luck (the reason as yet undiscovered) I decided to try again as the school Maths department required that all school students have access to the course they are using as a portal to their web resources.

I created a .csv file by ensuring that the fieldnames were as specified in the Moodle documentation using school usernames for ease and I set up the passwords to automatically require the students to change them the first time they log in.

Although the making of a .csv file within Open Office Calc was easy if laborious, the exporting was slightly tricky for two reasons. Firstly, I had to ensure that the 'character set' was correct (there is a bewildering array of these) and had to pick 'Unicode UTF-8' before saving and ensure that the same format was dselected for uploading into Moodle. Secondly, Open Office Calc wanted to assign 'text delimiters' by using double quotation marks, but Moodle doesn't like these, so it took a while to realise that I needed to delete the double quotation marks in the 'text delimiter' box before saving.

Moodle allows you, at the outset, to specify the courses that you want students to follow, so that courses then appear pre-populated. Therefore I was able to specify the Maths Central portal as being a course to which students were all assigned. This is an easier process than teachers having to go through the whole list of students and assign them themselves which would be long-winded.

One problem that Dale helped me to get round (he's so FAB it's not true) was that despite the default user language being 'English' all student accounts were in Bulgarian (presumably as this was the first in the alphabetical list of language packs available to users). We couldn't account for why Merapolis should have ignored the default setting of English, but eventually - when the optional language packs were disabled - English was set up as the new language for all users -phew!

Now that students are all set up hopefully all will go smoothly as students are introduced to the course.

Next on To Do list:

1. Investigating E-Portfolio System
2. Complete the setting up of ECDL Blended Learning course
3. Work on a new theme & colour scheme
4. Streamline user list by removing old and guest user accounts
5. Ensure old courses are backed up as exemplars
6. Update 'Popular Websites' block on main page