I asked cohorts expert Petr whether you should be able to add a whole cohort to a group in a course and he answered "they must be enrolled first, but if they already are it should be possible I think... hmmm, let me check the code... right, it is not there at all, I was just imagining something instead of implementing it I guess".
Thus, please create a tracker issue for it. Thanks for your help.
Love that quote - I was just imagining something instead of implementing it I guess
) although I suppose you could get them to add themselves to a course group by giving them the selection of group enrolment keys and getting them to choose the one they wanted.
The issue there is not with Groups / Cohorts, but with an ability to self-select a Group/Cohort, which does not exist in Moodle.
Self-selecting a Cohort is more problematic than self-selecting Groups also, because Cohorts are at a Site level, not a Course level (which is where most user permissions are). Self-selecting Cohorts would have to be something integrated in the user Profile area I suspect.
Stu.
Do you know if there has been any progress on cohorts being available within a module for selection as a group?
I'd like to know this as well. This would make groups much easier to manage, especially with very large classes (I have some with thousands of students, would like to group them effectively but end up spending hours assigning to groups...sometimes incorrectly).
In Moodle 2.4 you can specify a cohort when creating a group - see http://docs.moodle.org/en/Cohort_sync