Cohorts

Cohorts are site-wide or category-wide groups. Cohorts enable all members of a cohort to be enrolled in a course in one action, either manually or synchronised automatically

Creating a cohort

Cohorts can be created by site administrators and other users with appropriate permissions.

• Access Administration > Site administration > Users > Accounts > Cohorts

• Click the Add button
• NOTE In the dropdown you can choose between making your cohort available throughout the site "system" or in a named category.
• Complete the details and save the changes.
• Follow the assign link opposite the cohort name in the list of available cohorts.

• Select potential users from the list then click the Add button.

To synchronise cohort members with course participants, the Cohort sync enrolment plugin should be enabled in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins.

Adding users to a cohort in bulk

1. Access Administration > Site administration > Users > Accounts > Bulk user actions
2. Find users by setting an appropriate filter
3. Add users from the available list to the selected list
4. Choose 'Add to cohort' with selected users

Uploading users to a cohort

An administrator can upload users via CSV file to existing cohorts as follows:

1. Access Administration > Site administration > Users > Accounts > Upload users
2. Upload a text file with the following format:

username,password,firstname,lastname,email, cohort1
tomjones,Pass1234*,Tom,Jones,tomjones@example.com, year3
marysmith,Pass1234*,Mary,Smith,marysmith@example.com, year4

where year3 and year4 are the cohort ids of existing cohorts (i.e. not their names).

Note: If the users already exist on the system, then you only need their username with the chosen cohort in your csv file.

Searching cohorts

When a site has a large number of cohorts, keywords may be entered into the Search Cohorts box to search for or filter the available cohorts.

Please note, as the page title indicates, this only searches for cohorts created in the System context (i.e. it searches site-level cohorts but not category-level cohorts). To search for cohorts created in a Category context, go to that Category's page and in its Settings block, click the link to Cohorts.

Managing category cohorts

Cohorts which have been created for a category rather than the system can be located by selecting the appropriate category and then clicking the Cohorts link in Administration>Category (name)>Cohorts

Cohort capabilities

• Add and remove cohort members
• Create, delete and move cohorts
• Configure cohort instances
• View site-wide cohorts

See also

• Cohort sync enrolment method
• Cohort enroller role
• MDL-34189 Make category cohorts visible site-wide for site administrators
• A three minute Cohort in Moodle 2.0 video
• Cohorts in Moodle 2.0 video
• Using cohorts with Moodle 2.2 blog entry by Gavin Henrick