A couple of months ago we released two different ways to load district rosters into Alludo: automated rostering and adding people to a group. We released rostering early to a few customers to test and now we're sharing it with everyone.
Why Use Rostering
While we spent a lot of time making signing into Alludo as simple as possible, Rostering allows you to get all of your people into Alludo and assigned to the correct sites and courses without any action being required of your people. It also allows you to update people and their relationships automatically. In short, it increases engagement by reducing friction, which leads to increased learning.
Adding People to a Group
Adding people to a group is a quick, lightweight way to roster learners into Alludo. The format of the rostering file is simple and it does not require deep technical knowledge: you build your CSV file and then upload it directly into the group. If you need to load many people into Alludo and you do not need to worry about updating people automatically then adding people to a group is a great way to bring people into Alludo.
Automated Rostering
Automated rostering is the best option if you want to bring many people into Alludo and you want the ability to update the people in the future. For example, if you want to reflect the changes sites that teachers are at without requiring the teachers to make the updates themselves then automated rostering is a great solution.
Setting up automated rostering will more than likely require bringing in your IT team as you will need to pull the information from systems like your student information system and you will be publishing the information to Alludo on a regular (nightly) basis.
There are three basic steps to setting up automated rostering:
- Contact support
- Obtaining your SFTP credentials
- Uploading your files
The details with automated rostering are important so be sure to read the automated rostering knowledge base article.
What's Next with Rostering
Anyone that works with rostering knows that it is notoriously difficult. Entire businesses like our partner Classlink have been built to support rostering. We decided to simplify rostering as much as possible as a first step. Our approach will be to continue keeping rostering as simple as possible while incorporating your feedback to make it better.
