I've used Moodle a lot in my individual classes with, in my opinion, success. While I haven't actually made it into any of the extremely crowded crowded and popular Moodle session, I have tried to keep an eye on the blog posts coming out from the conference on Moodle. It seems that most of the posts are very optimistic and people are excited to try it. There is, however, one big issue that most people seem to have is student registration.

Apparently, most people have the perception that registration has to be done for or by each student using an actual, valid, email address. I would like to put forward that this is not actually the case. There are very few things in moodle that actually depend on that email address. The email addresses do need to be unique (but only within your moodle site), just not real. In several situations, I have batch uploaded entire student lists using a CSV file and the same BOGUS email address domain. The domain is the part after the @. I set the email address to something like firstname_lastname@bogusemail.com.

The instructions for batch uploading students are available on the user registration page inside any moodle installation and also this page on moodle documentation page. Here is an example of what I am talking about for the email address thing.

username,password,firstname,lastname,email kevinhansen2007,madeuppassword,Kevin,Hansen,kevinhansen2007@bogusemail.com

Now, this takes some work to generate the CSV file from whatever Student Information System SIS you have. Most of them can export as .csv,.xls (Excel), or some other format that can be converted to CSV. Using MS Excel you can edit them, make the needed changes and export it as the final CSV to use in Moodle.

Now, I realized one day (while generating a CSV file of 300 something students) that it was a lot of work to create the email address by hand in Excel. What I did was create a function in excel that would take the students first name and last name, combine them together with the year and the @bogusemail.com, and place the result in the email address column. Now that I think about it, I did the same thing for the students' username. I apologize that I don't have that formula here; I can't think of it off hand but most of you could figure it out.

Well, that's enough of that. This is not a full tutorial, just a starting point for some of those that might have given up on Moodle because of the email issue. If I get the chance and remember, I'll try to find that formula I mentioned earlier.

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