This feature was originally requested in January 2012: https://moodle.atlassian.net/browse/MDL-31038
The original reporter appears to have given up waiting for a resolution and marked it as "completed fixed" in October 2020. However, it is very relevant for us and our help desk who cannot scale to handling all of this work while also solving the rest of the world's problems.
This is very interesting, Jonathan!
Monday I got the chance to meet and talk to Thomas Korner.
He was asking me (I didn't get to look up the thing meanwhile) whether it was also possible to remove user's group memberships by CSV upload.
That would come in handy, at least to him. We could envision multiple such things, e.g. also deleting groups by CSV upload?
Your initial description "instructors can create groups and assign group membership" is covered by a plugin https://moodle.org/plugins/local_bulkenrol. And I think the format is even easier than CSV, which itself already could be a hurdle for some instructors. You just type the list in the text area. The maintainer and inventor will be present in Lübeck. local_bulkenrol to my knowledge doesn't manage to unenrol and to remove from groups, and to delete groups (appreciate if someone could confirm/contradict).
Best,
Luca
