Preparing a student list

You can create a student list from scratch, or you can create a text file from an existing application, such as a spreadsheet program. For example, if a class list already exists in a spreadsheet program, you can add the whole class from this file, instead of entering the information for each student into WebCT.

The text file must be formatted according to the following rules:

• the first line of the file must contain the names of the columns to be updated or created
• successive lines contain the data, with one student record per line.

The column names and items in each record must be separated by a field separator (delimiter), which can be either a comma, a space or a tab. The first line contains the column names. The rest of the lines contain the student records. The student record fields must be listed in the order imposed by the first line. For example, a data file might look like this:

Last Name,First Name,User ID,Password
Clinton,George,gclinton,george31
Collins,Bootsy,bcollins,bootsy52
Parker,Maceo,mparker,maceo19
Worrell,Bernie,bworrell,bernie26

If you want to leave a particular field blank for one student, just omit the data and type a comma to end the field. For example, to omit a first name for a record, type:

Clinton,,gclinton,george31

Note: The User ID field must always be present when uploading a file, since this ID uniquely identifies each student record.

Save the file with a .txt extension.

Note: Filenames can contain any of the following characters: a – z, A – Z, 0 – 9, _, &, ( ), –, ., and ~ . The tilde (~) cannot be used as the first character in the filename.