Microsoft 365: Secure Sharing with a Class in OneDrive

This will be a brief tutorial on securely sharing files in OneDrive with your class.

1Let's get the email address of the students in your class. The easiest way to do it will be to go to D2L and then to the Grades tab.

2From there, click on the grey "Export" button to the right of the blue "Import" button.

3On the Export Options page, scroll down until you see the section titled "user details". Ensure that the only thing selected is "email".

4Then find and click on "Export to Excel" in the bottom left of the page. If you do not have Excel, it may be best to download the CSV file instead.

5You should see a page similar to the one on the right. Wait until you see the image in the next step before proceeding. NOTE: for large classes, it may take a few minutes before the next image appears.

6When you see this message, click on the blue Download button and download the Excel Spreadsheet.

7When you open the spreadsheet, you should have something similar to the image on the right. Select "Enable Editing".

8

Select cell C2 (column C, row 2). In the Functions box, type in 

=CONCATENATE(B2, ";")

and hit enter. What you should see is the student's email from column B with a semi-colon at the end of it. This will be used to separate the emails when we go to paste them into OneDrive.

9To use the same formula across all of the emails, click on the bottom-right corner of the C2 cell. There should be a small green square. Then drag down the C Column to the same row as the last email address. For other ways on how to do this, view this Support Article by Microsoft. The rest of the emails should populate in, now with the added semi-colon (see the image in the next step)

10Select all of the emails in column C by selecting the first email. Then, find the last email address in the C column. Hold Shift and then left-click on the last email address to select all of the email addresses in that column. Finally, to copy the selected email addresses, either right-click and select "Copy" in the menu that appears or use CMD+C (Mac) or CTRL+C (Windows).

11Go to OneDrive and create a class folder. To create a folder, click on "New" in the upper-left and select "Folder". 

12Then, give your folder a name. A good name for a class folder could be something like "CAN101E_S2022", "RST201A_F2022", or "DMA325C_S2022". Then click on Create in the lower-right corner.

13Hover over the folder and click on the sharing icon to the right of the folder's name.

14In the section titled "Copy link", select "Anyone with the link can view" to bring up the sharing options.

15Select "Specific people"

16Paste in the emails from the spreadsheet. Each email should populate similar to the image on the right. If you want students to be able to edit all of the files in the folder, make sure that "Allow editing" is selected. Otherwise, click on "Apply" in the bottom-right corner.

17In the next pop-up that appears, click on "Copy" to copy the link. Then you can send the link via email to your students or add it to D2L as a link. Any file that you add to this folder will be shared with the entire class automatically.



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