Automatic Assignment of Class Groups
Afternoon all and welcome to my latest blog post. This week I want to look at how we can use functions in Moodle to automatically assign students into class groups within a course.
As I am sure all of you reading this would know, Moodle is traditionally a “course based” system. And while this works great for most educators, the reality is that we need to have some way of splitting students up into easier to use groups. In Moodle, we call these “Groups”…..Hard huh? 
The old fashioned way of doing this would have been to manually assign students to groups or to work on a fancy importing procedure. Both of which are painful. So how about a third easier option which involves using Group enrollment keys.
The Procedure
- First the course in question must have an enrollment key set. What it is is irrelevant, Moodle just needs to know a key is needed to enter this course
- Go into your courses “Groups” settings from the Administration menu and create a new group. You will see that you can also set an enrollment key for each group. Each of these keys must be unique.
- You can also add images for each group if you wish. This helps students differentiate each other when in combined tasks.
Thats It! Its now set up. Now when a student enters and types in a key Moodle will first look at the course key. If it matches it will let them in. If not however it will now compare the students key against each of the groups. If it matches one of the keys required by a group it will then enroll them into the course and automatically assign them to the matching group. Easy as that!
Use In Enterprise
This is a great way of locking things down within Enterprise/Business Moodle installations. When a user has paid for or is in a position to enter a course you typically want to separate them into classes or intakes. Rather than constantly enrolling them yourself or changing course keys, now all you have to do is create a group (i.e. “January Intake”) and give it it’s own key and send that key to the appropriate students. When finished, just delete the group or change the key to something unguessable. Should students start appearing in this intake that you know should not be there, you know you have a possible security breach and can act accordingly.
Use In Education
As explained in my video, this can get even easier for those in Primary or secondary education. Typically you are not that worried about where students go as long as they are in the courses they need to be. A year 7 student exploring a year8 course is not a bad thing (at least in my humble opinion). So for this reason I have made the enrollment keys for the groups the same in every single course. In my case my classes are based on a A-H scale, but yours might be numbers. Either way just create appropriate groups in all your courses and have the same keys cross the board. To make it even easier, change the language pack to present your students with instructions and this is a pinch to do.
Filed under: Moodle and tagged enrolment key, groups, Moodle, tips, tricks
Julian,
Thanks for this post. I learnt this technique from the workshop I did with you and I have to say it has solved many of the problems we were experiencing. I am now starting to put this into practice on the new courses we are creating at PLC and it works a treat.
One question… where do I edit the screen that asks for an enrolment key with the information that students can read to know what keys to use. I remember seeing it on your Moodle pages, but can’t seem to find where you set it. You know the page? the one that gives them the info about what keys to use.
It was in the video
The page is in the administration bloc, click on “Languages” and then you can edit the language packs. This is outlined towards the end of the video walkthrough.
JR
Hi Julian
Been using ‘groups’ as well & found them useful but as always Moodle is full of handy extra tips and bits you pointed out - informative and useful post, thanks.
I noticed you admin a Moodle users course in edna (what does AIS stand for?). I am toying with the idea of starting a similar thing locally (WA) as the popularity of Moodle is growing among teachers here but there is no focal point, just a few of us Moodle afficionados and ‘pushers’.
Would you mind if I direct our members to Playpen and a few other useful material you publish? I dislike reinventing the wheel and your work is up there on top for quality and ease
I noticed the AIS group is open for enrolment (no key). Do you intend to keep it that way (ie we could collaborate pretty easily)? Maybe we could get some other ‘cross-polination’ of the groups?
Keep up the good work !
Cheers
Tomaz Lasic
PS Loved the tutorial vithe video insert and excellent resolution with small filesize. How? Thanks mate
Hi there. Excellent video! Question: Is it possible to create unique keys per user? What I mean by this is to generate 100 unique, one-time use only keys that can then be distributed to 100 students. They login using their individual key — the key can no longer be used by anyone else. I don’t need any grouping or anything… I just need them to enroll using their unique key so that they can’t give the key to their friends and such. Does such Moodle functionality exist, or are there any plugins? Thanks so much in advance!
@Me Sadly there is no way of doing individual keys.