Guest role
Moodle has a built-in "Guest account". People can log in as guests using the "Login as a guest" button on the login screen. (This button can be enabled or disabled by the administrator via Administration > Users > Authentication.)
For a given course, the teacher can choose whether or not to allow guests in.
Guests ALWAYS have "read-only" access - meaning they can't leave any posts or otherwise mess up the course for real students.
They cannot:
- Post discussion messages
- Edit wiki pages
- Take quizzes
- Submit assignments
- Contribute glossary entries or comments
- View SCORM content (because progress not tracked for a guest)
- Receive any scores or grades (because of the read-only access)
This feature can be handy when you want to let a colleague in to look around at your work, or to let students see a course before they have decided to enrol.
Note that you have a choice between two types of guest access: with the enrolment key or without. If you choose to allow guests who have the key, then the guest will need to provide the current enrolment key EVERY TIME they log in (unlike students who only need to do it once). This lets you restrict which guests can get into a course. If you choose to allow guests to enter without a key, then anyone can get into your course.
Self-enrolment
Sometimes you may wish to allow people to have a more interactive engagement with a course without you having to enrol them in advance. In this case you can enable "self-enrolment" for your course. This allows anyone with a user account on your Moodle server to become a student on your course. As with guest access, you can use the enrolment key to limit this only to people to whom you have given the key.
See also
- Using Moodle Change in self-enrolment procedure and status of course visitors forum discussion
