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Dear John Paul

It is a long time since I have done any real development, so I am not a techy, but I know a bit about Web-PA. There is no group importing functionality yet, so you would need to produce PHP code to do the following to create something workable:

1) Import the students in to their appropriate modules using Web-PA's admin interface.  Make sure you include an institutional reference with each record so you can identify them later.

2) Write or generate a text file (or .csv) with all the required group information in.  The simplest format would be something like this, where "Group Name" is the name you want your new group to have, and "student id" would be the institutional reference of the each student member:

Group Name 1
student id
student id
student id

Group Name 2
student id
student id
.. etc ..

3) The tricky part is writing the PHP to read the .csv and generate the necessary Web-PA database entries.
If the code read the file line by line, the first non-empty line would be a group name, so use that to create a group object.  Every line after that is a student, so add them as members to the new group. When you reach a blank line, the next non-empty line will be a new group with new members.

It sounds simple on paper! 

Good luck and best regards

Adam

-----Original Message-----
From: WebPA Project [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Paul Posada
Sent: 23 March 2009 09:49
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Group creation and upload

Hi all,

I'd like to know if anyone has found a good solution for managing very large
student numbers and groups? 

Here at UNSW we have a multidisciplinary course ENGG1000 which is an
ambitious attempt at teaching Engineering design.  The course involves the
following faculties:

Biomedical  
Chemical 
Computer Science 
Civil 
Electrical 
Materials 
Mining 
Mechanical 
Petroleum 
Photovoltaics

There are about 1150 students enrolled with the option to choose a project
to work on within each faculty.  Each faculty project then further breaks
down their students into teams of about 5.  The end result is hundreds of
groups of students within all the projects which are then to be recreated in
WebPA for the Peer Assessment section of the course.  

In the past we used iPeer 2.0 for our pees assessment tool, but it seems to
now be a dead project and is very buggy.  

Has anyone had experience in managing such large amounts of Student Groups?
 I would love to be able to uploaded the groups into WebPA instead of having
to select each student into each group.

One solution I've thought of to alleviate this process a bit, is to create a
Module for each group and assigning the students to their respective
Modules.  This way when it comes time to assign the students to each group
the staff user only has to select all the students listed in that module as
opposed to scrolling through and finding them from a list of 1150 students.  

Does anyone know of a better way to manage this?  If so I'm all ears.

Thanks for your time.

John Paul


-- 
John Paul Posada
 
eLearning Project Officer
 
Faculty of Engineering
UNSW Kensington Campus
Building K17 1st Flr.