Enrolment

If your organisation doesn’t have an automatic enrolment system, then ensuring that only learners who need to be are in fact enrolled in your course is important.

To minimise the amount of work you need to invest in this administrative detail, we recommend a three-pronged strategy.

• First, use the course enrolment settings to limit who can enrol in the course and when. Set an enrolment period for the length of your drop/add time. Be sure to set an enrolment key as well. Only trainees who know the key will be able to enrol in your course, so you won’t need to worry about trainees enrolling without permission.
   

• Second, closely monitor your official course roster during the drop/add period. Be consistent about dropping and adding trainees on a regular basis so you don’t have a big mess at the end of registration.
• Third, encourage trainees who are enrolled to create an account and join your Totara course as quickly as possible. Many instructors make logging in and joining their Totara course a small, mandatory assignment. This helps trainees by forcing them to access your online resources early in the semester, and it makes enrolment management easier for you, since you won’t have to add as many trainees manually.

Enrolment methods

There are a large number of course enrolment methods available with Totara: 

• Learning Plan: Totara enrols learners in courses in their approved learning plan.
• Manual enrolment: The administrator or course teacher adds users manually.
• Self enrolment: A user can choose to enrol him/herself into a course.
• Cohort sync: Users are part of a Cohort which is added to the course.
• Course meta link: Users enrolled in other courses are given automatic access.
• Guest access: Users can view course materials but not participate.
• Category enrolments: Users are enrolled in all courses in a category.
• External database: Users are enrolled from a database such as Access, MySQL.
• Flat file: Users are enrolled with a csv file.
• IMS Enterprise: Users are enrolled with this standard XML file format.
• LDAP enrolment: Users are authenticated and then enrolled through LDAP.
• MNet remote enrolments: Users are enrolled via a linked Totara or Moodle site.
• PayPal: Users purchase enrolment with PayPal.
• Audience sync enrolment plug-in: Users who are members of an audience will be enrolled, and when they are not members they will be unenrolled.
  
  

Each course can enrol users using different of enrolment methods. The enrolment methods can be hidden and have their settings changed and reordered. 

Edit the site enrolment method

1. Click Enrolments on the Site Administration menu, under plugins.
2. Enable the enrolment method(s) that you wish to use in your Totara site.
3. To change the plugin setting, click on Edit opposite the enrolment plug-in(s) you have chosen.
4. Click the Save changes button.
    

Change the course enrolment method

1. Log in as a course administrator.
2. Select Course administration > Users > Enrolment methods.
3. Select Edit, Hide, Delete icon for the Enrolment method listed or choose Add method if the enrolment method is not listed.

Manually enrolling learners

Under Users in the Course Setting menu you are able to view the learners enrolled in the course and enrol individual learners and audiences.

1. Click Users in the Course administration menu.
2. Click Enrolled users.
3. Click the Enrol Users button to enrol individual learners.
4. Ensure the Assign roles dropdown box shows the role you are wanting to assign (default is Learner).
5. Select the Enrol button beside user from the list or Search for user.
6. When you have selected all the students select the Finish enrolling users button.

Changing enrolled users

1. Click Users in the Course administration menu.
2. Click Enrolled users.
3. This will show all enrolled users in a table with their Roles, Groups and Enrolment method.
4. Select the + or X in the table to change these.

Site administrator as an enrolled user

The site administrator has bypass logic and access rights to all aspects of the system, this allows them to bypass the normal conditions and procedures a regular user must step through. This means that the site behaviour will be different to the behaviour you'd expect compared to a normal user/learner.

The site administrator may wish to utilise the Switch role to... option within the Course administration menu to view content from a Learners perspective and see how this content will appear. It is, however, recommended that when completing learning in a live setting you should create a new learner account and not the site administrator login.