Manual Enrollments in Moodle

Being able to add individuals to a course is a great convenience. Typically, we see manual enrollments of students falling into one of two groups: waitlisted students and students from more than one section enrolled in a jointly taught course. Keeping track of manual enrollments is important for institutional recordkeeping as well as ensuring that we don't have students arriving at the end of the term having completed the coursework without ever being formally enrolled.

Waitlisted Students

It’s not unusual to add a learner to your course manually if they are waitlisted or need access to your course right away. You can remove those manual enrollments and help us track students who are manually entered — and don’t realize they are not formally registered for a course. Here's how:

1. Go to your Participants page.
2. In the Enrolled users interface, select Enrollment methods from the Select... field in the Match options area.
3. From the enrollment method options listed, select Manual enrollments.
4. Click on Apply filters.
5. If any students are listed in the resulting report, check to see if there are two "Active enrollments" listed. If so, one will include a trash icon and the other will not. Click on the trash can of any multiple enrollments and confirm that you want to delete the enrollment. Any student you unenroll will fall off the report.

A word of caution: If there is significant lag time (like a week or more) between a student being manually enrolled and formally enrolling, it's possible that work submitted by the student during that interval will be lost. Don't panic! You can manually re-enroll them and back date their enrollment to the course start date by clicking on the Show more.... link and that will restore any work they submitted.

Co-enrolled Students

If you're teaching a course that combines multiple sections that were not cross-listed in the schedule, you don't have to manually enroll students in order to have them enrolled in one Moodle course shell. Instead, create a meta course link. Besides cleaning up our records, using a meta course link means you don't have to make sure that everyone gets enrolled — Moodle will handle it!

Open the menu on the upper left and choose the Enrollment methods view. Open the Add method menu and select Course meta link. Enter the course reference number in the field provided to bring up the section that you wish to enroll, select the course and click on Add method. See these instructions for combining sections for additional details.