Enrollment Keys

The courses I'm building will, at some point, be bought in bulk by Local Authorities (LAs) to be used by individuals.  I need to think up some relatively hassle free way of these individuals getting access to the courses that have been bought for them.

I could just keep the self enrollment method I already have set up and trust that everyone will be honest and only enroll on the courses they've been told to use (which would probably work, the computer shy users will probably not try doing anything more than they have explicit instructions for) but that's a bit lax.

Ideally I could use single use enrollment keys.  If I could set each course to have a bunch of enrollment keys that only work once, they could then be distributed by the LAs.  Unfortunately Moodle doesn't support this.

On our current system, we manually set up user accounts and then tell people their login info.  There usually a maximum of half a dozen a month so we set up the accounts on the first of the month and it takes, at most, a couple of hours.  But this means users a waiting for access and it's an administrative task that, to my mind, could be cut out.

The best solution I have come up with so far is to use group enrollment keys.

Firstly, the course in question has to have self enrollment with an enrollment key.  I mentioned how to do that in an earlier post.  Once that's done, while logged in as an admin, go to Settings > Course Administration > Edit Settings and scroll down to Groups.  Next to Group mode set that to either separate groups or visible groups.  I've choose separate groups as this means the groups can't see each other.

No go to Settings > Course Administration >Users > Groups.  Create a new group and give it an enrollment key.  When a user enrolls, they will be asked for an enrollment key.  They can use either the one defined in the course settings or the one defined in the group settings.  If they use the group key they will be put in that group when they enroll.

Now if you want fifty different enrollment keys, manually creating fifty groups is time consuming.  Instead open Excel (or whatever spreadsheet program you have) and make a spreadsheet that has one column labelled groupname and one labelled enrolmentkey (note the spelling, Moodle thinks enrollment only has one L).  The labels have to be in the top row.  In the group name column write the name of your first group e.g. group001.  Drag the bottom corner of that box down and you will see Excel wants to put group002, group003 and so on all the way down the column.  For ease I am using the group names as the enrollment key so I just copied all the group names into the enrolmentkey column.

Then save the spreadsheet as a .csv file.  Excel might try to kick up a fuss about features or whatever but just press ok.  The on the groups page in Moodle, select Import Groups.  Choose your .csv and Moodle will create as many groups as you had in your spreadsheet with the enrollment keys.

I can now give this batch of enrollment keys to the LAs to distribute as they see fit.  Of course, users could use the same enrollment key to get other people they know on the course but a quick look by an admin at the groups page will tell you if more than one person is in a group and then they can be kicked out.

I'm still looking for a way to limit the number of members in each group.  That way each group could be set to a maximum number of 1 and the enrollment keys would, in effect, be single use.

Feb 2012 update:  Just a note to add, the .csv that you import groups from can only have those two columns or it won't work.  I want to keep a record of who has what enrolment keys so I have one Excel work book with everything on and just save one worksheet with only those two columns as a .csv.

Also, say you have made fifty groups by importing a .csv and want another fifty groups.  You can use the original spreadsheet with the extra groups added and import it the same way.  Moodle will recognised the groups that already exist and produce an unsuccessful message, and add the new ones normally.

Unfortunately I still don't have a way to limit the number of groups members.