Faculty Contact block creates an auto-generated list of faculty and their contact information on a course. Roles considered 'faculty' can be globally selected, and the user profile is extended with some new profile fields for office location, office hours, professional salutation, and biography URL. When set, these are shown in the faculty contact block.

Automating setting & updating these new profile fields:

The moodle 'Site Admin -> Users -> Accounts -> Upload users' functionality can be used to upload a CSV file with
the profile data in it. Upload a CSV file of the following format, with this header line, and line for each
faculty or moodle user you want to add or modify the new fields for:

username,firstname,lastname,email,profile_field_facultyheadertbird,profile_field_officetbird,profile_field_officehourstbird,profile_field_biourltbird
johanr,Johan,Reinalda,user@emailaddress.com,Asst. Prof. Reinalda,My Building Rm X,MWF 1-2PM,http://www.thunderbird.edu/bio/reinalda

Note that the fields "username,firstname,lastname,email" are required by Moodle.
The other fields map to the specific new profile fields that are added by this block.
Make sure you select the proper settings for your environment when uploading the csv
(specifically, look at 'Upload type", and "Select for bulk user actions = Yes")
See also the sample CSV file in the "docs" directory/