Making a course self enrollable (or the art of delegation)

The highest mark I got for a piece of work at university was 79% and it was for an essay on the McDonaldization of global culture.  You could say a lot of people think McDonaldization is the same as globalization.  That would be wrong, and not just because it would be inaccurate to say a lot of people had ever thought about McDonaldization.  I forget what the conclusion of my essay was but I do remember one of the key points of McDonaldization that makes it different from Globalization is that in McDonald's the customer does a lot of the work themselves.  They go to the counter to order, they carry the food to the table and when they're done they (should) clear the table themselves.  This means McDonald's needs less staff and can make more profit.

This concept is ubiquitous online.  If you want an account with anyone you fill in the form and submit it yourself.  If Google had to manually add every user to their database it would take forever.  Except it wouldn't take forever because they would have folded as a company before they got started.

So expecting our Moodle users to sign themselves up is not a bizarre concept.

To make your course self enrollable first you need a course.  Done that?  Good.

Logged in as an admin, select the course you want.  In the Settings menu chose Users > Enrollment Methods.  From the drop down choose Self Enrollment.  On the next screen you need to make sure Allow Self Enrollment is set to Yes.  You can leave the rest alone if you don't need it (or don't know what it means).

I'm going to set an Enrollment Key because, as I mentioned in my earlier post, the payment system is still in the works and I want to keep the riff raff out.  I'm going to use a simple, logical enrollment key because my brain is full of useless information like the difference between McDonaldization and Globalization and I tend to forget things I might actually need.  Although, if I do forget it I can just come back to this page and tick the Unmask button to see what the Key is.

Congratulations!  Your users can now do your work for you.