Enrolment plugins

Location: Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins in 2.0 onwards or Administration > Courses > Enrolments pre-2.0.

Managing course enrolment

Once the site administrator has set up user authentication, created some courses and assigned teachers to them, the next thing to consider is course enrolment i.e. assigning users the role of student in a course.

Moodle provides a number of ways of managing course enrolment, called enrolment plugins. Enrolment plugins included in the standard Moodle are:

• Authorize.net Payment Gateway
• External database
• Flat file
• IMS Enterprise (from 1.6 onwards)
• Internal enrolment (default method)
• LDAP
• Paypal
• Moodle Network (from 1.8 onwards)

Setting the enrolment method

Choosing an enrolment plugin in 1.9

To set the enrolment method:

1. Click on Courses in the Site Administration block, then Enrolments.
2. Click on the enable checkboxes opposite your chosen enrolment plugin(s). If you wish, you may choose more than one enrolment method. For example if you have some courses which students must pay for and some free courses, you can use PayPal and internal enrolment.
3. Click the "Save changes" button.
4. Click on Edit opposite one of the enrolment plugin(s) you have chosen.
5. Configure the required settings and click the "Save changes" button.
6. Repeat Editing until you have edited all the plugins you have enabled.

In Moodle 2.0 onwards, the order in which enrolment plugins are applied can be set. This may be important for some plugins, it also affects the order of enrolment options on the course enrol page.

Multi-enrolment

From Moodle 1.6 onwards, multi-enrolment methods are supported, with one plugin set as the default plugin for interactive enrolment.

Interactive enrolment

Interactive enrolment triggers only when a user tries to enrol on a course. The user has to do something interactively in order to be enrolled, such as clicking "Yes, I do" (Internal enrolment), or paying some money (Authorize.net Payment Gateway, Paypal).

The interactive enrolment plugin for a particular course may be selected on the Course settings page.

Enrolment section in Course settings

Login-time enrolment lookups

Login-time lookups perform a search of username and passwords against an an external database when a user logs in. For example, a course may use a LDAP/AD database. You can have several plugins set to perform login-time lookups.

Common course settings

Welcome to course message

Moodle1.9

When users self-enrol in a course, they receive a welcome message via email which is determined by the site settings.

• Note: This feature may have(MDL-15916) a "Send welcome message?" course setting in Moodle 1.9.3
• The Moodle site course welcome message can be edited in a language pack by the site administrator (welcometocoursetext in the moodle.php).

Course enrolment settings

The course administration block "Settings" link has many different enrolment options. These include setting durations by either a course open/close dates or by a time period for each student, notifications of expiration of enrolment and other settings.

See also

• Unenrolment
• Enrolment FAQ
• Using Moodle Enrolment Plugins forum
• Using Moodle Can't use External Database Enrollment Plugin forum discussion