Enrollment FAQ

General Enrol and Unenroll Questions

How do I prevent students/users from enrolling themselves in a course?

If you are an instructor in a course, go to Course administration > Users > Enrollment methods and disable (close the eye) of the self-enrollment option.
If you are site admin, go to Site administration > Plugins > Manage enroll plugins and disable (close the eye) of the self-enrollment plugin.

Why are users being unenrolled for no apparent reason?

In a course, go to Course administration > Users > Enrollment methods and click the edit (hand/pen)icon of the self-enrollment option. Check the time in the dropdown next to Unenroll active after… (See Unenrollment for a full list of what controls unenrollment.)
As a site administrator, you can specify the default time after which a user is unenrolled in Site administration > Plugins > Enrollments > Self-enrollment

Why are all students/users enrolled in all courses?

It may be that your users have been mistakenly assigned the system role of student. Check Site Administration > Users > Permissions > Assign system roles and unassign users as necessary, then reassign them the role of student in the course context. See Assign roles for an explanation of role contexts.

How do I enable

students/users

to unenroll themselves from courses?

To enable students to unenroll themselves from any course:

1. Access Site Administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles
2. Click the edit icon opposite the student role
3. Change any/all of the capabilities enroll/manual:unenrollself, enroll/PayPal:unenrollself and enroll/self:unenrollself (depending upon which enrollment plugins are enabled for the site) from Not set to Allow
4. Click the “Save changes” button at the bottom of the page

To enable students to unenroll themselves from a particular course:

1. Go to Course administration > Users > Permissions
2. Click the Allow icon (+) opposite the appropriate unenrollself capability (corresponding to the method in which students are enrolled) and allow the Student role

Note: If students are manually enrolled in the course, then enroll/manual:unenrollself should be allowed; if students self-enroll, then enroll/self:unenrollself should be allowed.

How do I prevent instructors from accidentally disabling enrollment methods in a course?

Edit the instructor role in Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles and uncheck the capability lms/course:enrollconfig.

I don’t see the ‘Enrol users’ button when clicking on ‘Enrolled users’

Make sure Manual enrollment is enabled in your course. If you are using only external types of enrollment, but the course has no manual enrollments allowed, then you would not see the ‘Enrol users’ button as it is controlled outside the course.

If you should be able to do this, make sure you are in the Teacher or another role that has this capability. Make sure you did not inadvertently leave your self in the Student or Editing Teacher role when using the Switch roles to… button.

Self-enrollment Questions

Is there a way for instructors to be notified when students/users enroll in a course?

Flat file enrollment includes an email notification feature when enrollment is complete; however, there is no option for self-enrollment.

When a student self-enrolls, can the welcome email message be customized?

Yes – see the section ‘Sending a welcome message to new users’ in Self-enrollment for details.

Who does the course welcome email come from?

In the self-enrollment settings, you can specify whether the welcome message comes from the course contact, the Keyholder or from the default no-reply address. If the course contact is chosen, and there is more than one user with the role, then the welcome message is sent from the course contact with the surname that comes first in alphabetical order.

Cohorts, Meta-courses, Guest, and other enrollment types

Why can I not add a cohort to my course? (I know there is one!)

By default, instructors can add cohorts to their courses but only if the admin has set the cohort to be visible and available in the category where the instructor is trying to use it. Check with your site admin or manager if you think you should be able to enroll a certain cohort.

I am using Paypal but users can access my course without paying

Make sure you don’t also have Self-enrollment without an enrollment key enabled. This would allow users to bypass Paypal. (If you need some users to self-enroll for free as well as clients enrolling through Paypal, then add an enrollment key in the self-enrollment settings.)

Can I have a metacourse of a metacourse?

This is not possible. See Course meta link. You might be able to use Cohorts instead.

Miscellaneous

How do I change the spelling of “enroll” to “enroll”?

“Enroll” is the spelling in the American dialect of English. To switch your site to use this, you should install the American English language pack (en_us) via Administration > Site administration > Language > Language packs then choose it as the default language for the site in Administration > Site administration > Language > Language settings.

All new accounts on the site will then have en_us set as the preferred language in their profile. This will not, however, automatically update the language of any existing users. They should then be told to set en_us as the preferred language in their own profile settings.

How can I prevent certain instructors from appearing in the course participants list?

Who appears on the participant list is controlled by their role. Anyone in the default Teacher role will show up there. One way to work around this is to create a duplicate role from Teacher which has one small difference in Permissions. Do this as follows:

1. Go to Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles and click on the teacher role
2. Click the ‘Duplicate role’ button
3. Rename the role as ‘Non-participating teacher’ or similar
4. Enter lms/course:view in the filter and tick the checkbox to allow the lms/course:view capability
5. Click the ‘Create this role’ button
6. Go to a course then Administration > Course administration > Users > Other users
7. Click the ‘Assign roles’ button and assign users the role of ‘Non-participating teacher’

How can I change who shows up on as the instructor on the front page list of courses?

This can be set by the administrator in Site administration > Appearance > Courses > Course contacts. If you use the duplicate a Teacher role trick above, you can also then control whether they show up in the course catalog for all users as well as the course participants list.

How can I get the grades back for a user who was accidentally unenrolled?

See the section on unenrollment and user data in Unenrollment related to the setting in Site administration > Grades > General settings > Recover grades default.

What is the difference between unenrolled and suspended?

A user who is suspended from a course can no longer access the course themselves, but their enrollment and all their data and activities in the course are unchanged. Use suspend when you wish to block access for a user from a course, temporarily or permanently, but do not wish to affect their data there in any way.

Unenrollment removes the user from the course, and depending on other settings, may remove or delete their course data including grades.

See the section on Suspended or Unenrolled in Unenrollment for more details.

How can I suspend a user from a course?

As a Teacher you can do this in Course administration > Users > Enrolled users and clicking the Edit (gear) icon next to the username and changing their status from Active to Suspended. This is convenient for a single or small number of users.

To do this en masse for many users, a site administrator or Manager can suspend users from courses via a text/CSV file from Site administration>Users>Accounts>Upload users using the enrollstatus field. See Upload_users#Fields_that_can_be_included for more details.

How can I export/print out a list of all enrolled users in my course?

As a Teacher that can be done as follows:

1. select “Course administration > Grades”
2. then continue by selecting “Grade administration > export”. Choose there whichever file type you want as output (e.g. OpenDocument file).
3. Now in the following page deselect all the grade items to be included by clicking on ‘select all/none’.
4. Click on ‘Submit’ and you will have the list of all your enrolled users as a file that you can edit or print out.

What you have actually exported is an empty grades lists of all the course users, i.e. only their name, surname, and e-mail address.