Auto-Groups

Auto-Groups

by Alex Smith -
Number of replies: 8

I don't fully undertsnad the Auto-Groups documentation so if someone oculd answer this question for me it would be much appreciated.

Is is possible/easy, to auto create a group for every individual user, and base that group on there user name.

For example: | User - John Smith | Group - John Smith |

This is all because I am using Groupings to control what is displayed to each individual user in a course. Therefore I need each user to be in their own Group, which can then be added to a Grouping within that course.

I hope that makes sense. smile

 

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In reply to Alex Smith

Re: Auto-Groups

by Mary Cooch (personal account) -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Testers

yes - use a csv file - 

username, password, firstname, lastname, email (etc, usual fields if you are uploading from scratch) course1, group1

where course1 is the shortname of the group they are in and group1 is their named group.  So...

 

johnsmith,1234,John, Smith,lasj@aslakjdal.com,French, JohnSmith

marybrown,5678,Mary,Brown, slkdsjf@sdlfkdsjf.com, French,MaryBrown 

and so on... Moodle will automatically create the groups in the courses for you.

Oh and - PS - could you point me in the direction of the bit of documentation that you don't "fully understand" so we can write it a bit more clearly please? Thankssmile

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In reply to Mary Cooch (personal account)

Re: Auto-Groups

by Itamar Tzadok -

Mary, there is some recent discussion about the auto-group feature of the groups component. Currently there seems to be no way to auto-create groups per participants with their designated members, such that group names are the participants names rather than Group A-Z or Group 1-100 . The csv approach you suggest is only from site administration which is not necessarily available to every course instructor. The closest a non-admin instructor can get is the course groups import feature which allows for creating the desired groups but if the participants are already enrolled it's not clear how they would be added to their designated group if the instructor hasn't added them manually. smile

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In reply to Itamar Tzadok

Re: Auto-Groups

by Michael Woods -
Picture of Core developers

Yes, would agree with this. I've encouraged our teachers to use the auto-create groups feature, but they invariably feel the need to change the 'Group A', 'Group B' to be the actual names of the students, and I don't blame them, from a usability perspective.

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In reply to Itamar Tzadok

Re: Auto-Groups

by Sarah Smith -

Thank you for you msg i'll look at this forum throughly and will see groups.Thanks you

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In reply to Mary Cooch (personal account)

Re: Auto-Groups

by Alex Smith -

Mary.

I think Itamar has cleaned up some of the issue's in the documentation that I didn't understand. I wrongly assumed that I could assign different names for the auto-groups but couldn't work out how. I now understand I must have A-Z or 1-100.

A question to Mary, Itamar and Michael:-
Say I do let the autogroups function work as it does and it assigns the first person that enrols on a course to auto-group 1, the next to auto-group 2 and so on.
My question is: If John Smith is assigned to Auto-Group 89, how do I find him when I want to add the Group to a Grouping (As I wouldn't know that Group 89 had John Smith in it would I?). Is it easy to query which group a member is in?

Also Itamar. How does the course groups import feature work as a solution?

Thank you to all 3 of you for your help and inputs so far, it is very much appreciated!

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In reply to Alex Smith

Re: Auto-Groups

by Itamar Tzadok -

The overview tab under the course groups lists all groupings and for each grouping the grouped groups and their members. If the overview had some ui for moving groups into and out of groupings it would have been fairly easy to manage even with obscure group names.

The course groups import feature allows you only to create the groups with your choice of naming but it doesn't add the users to the groups. You would have to that manually. So, it's not much of a solution.

The obvious problem with auto-creation of groups per participants with participant name for the group name is that group names have to be unique and participants' names are not necessarily so. So name duplications have to be resolved one way or another.

I've just hacked the autogroup code to to auto create groups with participants names. For uniqueness I added to the name the participant's user id in parentheses (e.g. 'John Doh (3)' where 3 is John's user id). User ids may be long so the current auto numbering could be used instead to suffix the participant's name. It's not the most elegant solution but not necessarily less elegant than the current naming method. And it's just 3 more mostly harmless lines of code. smile

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In reply to Itamar Tzadok

Re: Auto-Groups

by Brian Huntley -

Itamar - 


I have a faculty member who is every interested in this functionality.   Do you by chance have a patch or diff file available for your mostly harmless :D code changes?

Thanks!

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