As an LMS instructor or an administrator, you’ll often find yourself in the need of making changes to multiple entities (Learners, lessons, etc) at once. You could, of course, do all those changes manually, one by one, but eFront provides powerful tools to automate your workflow.

The most common use cases for this would be assigning a set of courses to new users when starting a new e-learning program (e.g. at the start of a semester). To automate this action, as with many Learner-related actions, you can use eFront’s “groups” functionality. Groups help you organize users into logical sets, allowing you to treat all of them as a single entity.

Actions performed in the group can be applied by eFront to each and every member of the group.

Specifically, a group comes with mass actions to synchronize its users with its courses. Let’s walk through the mass assignment of a set of courses to a number of users.

1. In the eFront UI, click to visit the Groups section. A tabular listing of all existing groups will be shown, along with an “Add Group” button allowing you to add a new group.
2. Click to add a new group. Enter a name for the group (e.g. “class of 2015”) and optionally select a branch the group will belong to or enter a short description.
3. Click to save your new group, and select the newly created group. There are links to see the list of Users and Courses assigned to it. Begin by assigning the users you want to the group. Then assign a number of courses to the group.
4. The final step is to click to enroll all of the group’s users to the group’s courses (1) (eFront doesn’t perform this automatically behind your back, to give you the ultimate flexibility to handle it however you like).

If you want this set of courses to be automatically assigned to every new user that is added to the system, either manually from the administrator or by himself by self signing-up, you can go to the Group advanced settings (2) and set the group as Default (3).