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Grapevine Learning Support

Importing enrollments from a spreadsheet

Also in Site admins

A file of people, enrolled in one go. It creates accounts for anybody who has none, so a list of names and addresses is enough.

The file

A CSV with a header row. The columns it reads:

  • email — required. This is the person. Everything keys on it.
  • first name and last name — used if the account has to be created.
  • course — required. The course’s address slug or its id.
  • role — optional, defaults to student.

Save as CSV from whatever you use. Exports with accented characters are handled. So are files saved on Windows.

Check before apply

The importer always does two steps, and they are two separate actions rather than one with a tick box — “tell me what this does” and “do it” should not be one mistyped setting apart.

  1. Check. Upload the file. Nothing is written. You get a row-by-row report: who will be created, who already exists, which courses were found, and which rows are wrong.
  2. Read the report. Particularly the cost, and anything saying a course was not found.
  3. Apply. Only then is anything written.

What it will cost

Every student enrollment on a free course is billable — currently $5 each. A 500-row file is a $2,500 charge on the next nightly run.

The check tells you the figure before you commit. Read it. A file with a duplicated block of rows, or one that enrolls everybody onto three courses instead of one, looks almost identical to a correct file and costs three times as much.

Running it twice is safe

Enrollments are unique per person and course, so a second run of the same file enrolls nobody twice and bills nothing twice. “Did that work?” is the commonest reason a file gets uploaded again, and it does not punish you for it.

Common failures

  • Course not found. Check the slug against the course’s address — it is the last part of the URL, not the title.
  • Two addresses for one person. They get two accounts. Deduplicate the file first. It is far easier than merging afterwards.
  • A stray column or a shifted header. The check will show addresses appearing in the name column. Look at the first few rows of the report rather than skipping to the total.