The term importing groups may give you the impression that you will import students into a group. The Import Groups button does not import students into groups. It imports a text file that you can use to create groups. So, if you need to create a lot of groups at once, you can use this feature to do this.

This needs to be done by a site administrator.

If you need to import students and put them into groups, use the upload students feature described in the Adding student to a cohort in bulk – Upload section. However, instead of adding students to the cohort, you will add them to a course and group. You perform this by specifying the course and group fields in the upload file, as shown in the following code:

username,email,firstname,lastname,course1,group1,course2 
moodler_1,[email protected],Bill,Binky,history101,odds,science101 
moodler_2,[email protected],Rose,Krial,history101,even,science101 
moodler_3,[email protected],Jeff,Marco,history101,odds,science101 
moodler_4,[email protected],Dave,Gallo,history101,even,science101 

In this example, we have the minimum needed information to create new students. These are as follows:

• The username
• The email address
• The first name
• The last name

We have also enrolled all the students in two courses: history101 and science101. In the history101 course, Bill Binky, and Jeff Marco are placed in a group called odds. Rose Krial and Dave Gallo are placed in a group called even. In the science101 course, the students are not placed in any group.

Remember that this student upload doesn't happen on the Groups page. It happens under Administration | Site administration | Users | Upload users.