Course Enrollment: 3 Ways to Easily Add Learners to Your Moodle™ Courses

Generally, almost every pursuit of education starts with enrollment. Be it basket weaving or biology, a classroom experience or an online course, the enrollment process is standard across virtually all learning endeavors. However, the approach you choose around this process is worth some consideration in relation to the size of your institution or organization, the goals of your courses, and more. This is especially true as the available options can make what could be a tedious process more streamlined and organized.

Course Enrollment Methods in MoodleTM

At its core, MoodleTM offers several methods by which administrative staff members are able to enroll learners into their courses. These include:

• A manual individual process that allows the addition of single users into the correct environment
• Enrolling in bulk groups to drastically cut down the amount of time spent on enrollment administration
• Self-enrollment options for end-users to choose their own learning plan

Which option is best for you and your learners?

1) Self-Enrollment

Depending on the type of educational environment and courses you offer, the easiest route to take would be to allow the users to take care of their own enrollment. With your course set up, you can navigate to the enrollment methods from the settings menu and peruse the available options. Enabling self-enrollment here would add a simple button to the course that gives students access to the content with a single click.

Self-enrollment does have potential drawbacks. Users can sometimes enroll themselves in a course accidentally, enroll themselves into more courses than they can handle, or don’t return to a course they enrolled in, which could result in a number of inactive users in the reports generated from the course.

2) Manual Enrollment

Manual enrollment, by comparison, can be controlled by a teacher, manager, or course administrator, allowing some regulation over the users who are added to the course. This is best suited to courses without a large number of participants, as the process for individually enrolling users one by one can take some time. It’s also a useful secondary method to keep around in the event of needing to enroll any last-minute learners or stragglers who were missed by another manner.

MoodleTM also offers a Guest Access method of course viewership, whereby people outside of the institution or organization are able to view and participate in courses without the need to have a profile on the platform. This is ideal for courses intended to gauge interest of individuals not yet fully signed up to a program or place of learning, such as ‘tasters’, and also courses that don’t include any privileged or copyrighted content.

3) Cohort Sync

Finally, the quickest and most efficient method to bulk enroll users into courses would be by Cohort Sync. In this scenario, administrators can create cohorts of users based on any given criteria, such as a program map, new starters, individuals who all report to the same line manager—anything! Once a cohort has been created, it (along with all of its members) can be enrolled into a course in one action by selecting Cohort Sync from the enrollment methods inside the course and choosing it from the dropdown of existing cohorts.

Additionally, after a cohort has been added to a course, there’s nothing to stop you adding further learners into it, which would then synchronize them into the courses for which the cohort has been added. This is ideal for programs where people may join at different times and are required to complete the same course.

Improve Your MoodleTM Courses Now!

Course enrollment is just one tiny component of MoodleTM functionality and configuration. Highly interoperable and modular, your courses can be designed from course enrollment to course completion based on your preferences for a fully-customized solution. Whichever option of enrollment you choose for your course, MoodleTM is flexible enough that you can nominate different methods for different courses that you may host, allowing you to find a routine that best suits your needs.

To learn more about optimizing your MoodleTM instance or the advantages of an Open LMS eLearning solution, contact us with your questions or request a free demonstration below.