We have now set up our site and begun building the foundation of our CIMS by creating accounts for our teachers and then creating courses, categories, and assigning teachers to those courses all at the same time, with the Bulk Course Upload tool. It's now time to learn how to create student accounts in bulk and experiment with different ways of enrolling those students in courses on our site.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

Many educational programs place students in courses without requiring students to select and register for their own courses. This may be the case for all of the courses offered within an educational program or only for a portion of the curriculum. An elementary school, for example, will, in most cases, assign groups of students to teachers each year, thus forming the classes that we are all familiar with. Many junior and senior high schools, in addition to colleges, universities, and other educational programs, designate some courses for students while requiring them to register for others.

The following two explanations, auto-enrollment when creating accounts and bulk enrollment for existing users, assume that student enrollment in courses is either predetermined by the school or program, or that the enrollment information is obtained from a tool external to the Moodle system such as a proprietary registration system. Additionally, to position Moodle as a CIMS, it is important to create all of the courses that exist in an educational program and enroll all the students registered for those courses in the courses in the Moodle system even if the teacher of the course does not plan to use Moodle as an instructional tool in his or her course. This is, therefore, the approach taken in the following examples.