Cohorts
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| Cohorts | |
|---|---|
| Project state | Work in progress |
| Tracker issue | MDL-21781 |
| Discussion | n/a |
| Assignee | Petr Škoda (škoďák) |
Moodle 2.0
Goals
Site-wide groups (aka cohorts) is one of the most requested missing features.
- Simplify manual enrolments - instead of enrolling students one by one, it would be possible to enrol a cohort with single click.
- Cohort enrolment plugin - new enrolment plugin synchronising users in cohort with enrolments in a course (including role assignment and group membership)
- Synchronisation with external systems - some external systems do not know the actual courses, they only contain some user groups, at present we do not have a simple way to reuse these groups in Moodle.
- Partially replace meta courses
- Replace category enrolments - category enrolments have major design issues and are not compatible with incoming enrolment changes.
DB tables
Table cohort definition of site-wide groups (aka cohorts)
| Field | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| id | int(10) | auto-incrementing | |
| contextid | int(10) | foreign key, references context.id | |
| name | char(254) | human readable cohort name | |
| idnumber | char(100) | unique identifier of the cohort, can be used in external systems | |
| description | text | longer description | |
| descriptionformat | int(2) | text format | |
| component | char(100) | component name of a plugin responsible for assignment of users (ex: auth_ldap, etc.), NULL means manual assignments | |
| timecreated | int(10) | timestamp, creation date | |
| timemodified | int(10) | timestamp, last modification |
Context specified can be system or course category level, defining of cohort a course context would not make much sense.
Table cohort_members stores cohort members
| Field | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| id | int(10) | auto-incrementing | |
| cohortid | int(10) | foreign key, references cohort.id | |
| userid | int(10) | foreign key, references user.id | |
| timeadded | int(10) | timestamp, when added |
New capabilities
- moodle/cohort:assign - add/delete members (only for manual assignment cohorts with source == null)
- moodle/cohort:manage -add/delete/move cohorts
- moodle/cohort:view - view membership and use cohort elsewhere
Context id defined in cohort table is used for access control only, the cohort may be actually used in any context (this may happen when moving courses, categories or cohorts).
User interface
- Cohort edit link in CONTEXT_SYSTEM and each CONTEXT_COURSECAT- most probably from the settings block
- Option for manual cohort enrolment - part of new enrolment UI
- New UI in cohort enrolment plugin
- New options in group creation UI
- New options for sync with external groups in auth or enrol plugins
Implementation steps
- add db tables and cohort membership UI
- add option to assign role to all cohort users (one time only, no sync)
- enrolment rewrite
- cohort enrolment plugin
Upgrade
Cohorts are designed to replace course category enrolments because the new enrolment plugin is not compatible with this.
