Staggered or delayed access to courses over a period of time.

Staggered or delayed access to courses over a period of time.

by David Macara -
Number of replies: 5

Hello all-

I'm looking into options that will automatically grant enrolled students access to courses over a period of time.

For example-

  1. Week 1 student is enrolled and only course 1 is available.
  2. Week 2 course 2 becomes available.
  3. Week 3 couse 3 becomes available... and so on.

I'm trying to find an option that won't drive our admin staff insane. The only real option that I've found so far includes editing the enrolment settings (enrolment starts/ enrolment ends) for each individual student within each individual course. This would drive our admin staff insane.

Another option that I can think of might be enrolling groups to cohorts, then keeping a diary and using the cohort enrollment option to enroll on relevant dates. Once again this involves a little too much record keeping outside Moodle for my liking, and would soon swell to a slow and onerous task. 

Are there any other options available that might streamline this process? Ideally I'd like to be able to enrol students, then have some measure of (pre-determined) control over when they have access to the courses that they've been enrolled in.

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In reply to David Macara

Re: Staggered or delayed access to courses over a period of time.

by Bill Antonia -

How about enrolling all your students into all courses but only have the courses visible for the week those particular courses are required.

You only have to keep track of courses, not students,

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In reply to Bill Antonia

Re: Staggered or delayed access to courses over a period of time.

by David Macara -

Thanks for the suggestion, Bill. Nice idea, but the problem is that this is going to play havoc with our billing system as we're charging at the point of enrolment. We're also looking at many multiple groups using our courses concurrently, and I'm not too sure if the 'hide all' button will influence the other groups.

I guess I'm asking for a magic bullet for this task that I might have overlooked. Some kind access control that will let me build this 'delayed access' functionality into overall course progression and not just at course level.

Increasingly I'm getting the feeling that this is best handled with groups, and that its' best handled by the affiliated non-editing teacher for each group.

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In reply to David Macara

Re: Staggered or delayed access to courses over a period of time.

by Bill Antonia -

Hmmmmm....... Ok, clutching at straws here as you have quite a few requirements. Not sure if this fits the but here goes.

Create multiple databases (not Moodle ones!), one for each enrolment period with different names. Manipulate students to course entries before the enrolment is required to happen within each database. In a cron job or scheduled task run the database enrolment plugin on the date the enrolments are to take place. In the database enrolment plugin you would need to change the database name between each enrolment period ready for the next.

My only problem is this does not solve the group problem.

I have no experience using separate groups. We use a combination of database enrolment and meta courses but as a school I leave the groupings up to the teachers within their own courses. All they do is create their courses meta courses to the ones I populate students to using data from our MIS.

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In reply to Bill Antonia

Re: Staggered or delayed access to courses over a period of time.

by David Macara -

Thanks for your help again, Bill. The multiple database approach is a good idea. Apart from a curious pool of requirements, we're stuck in a limited operating environment, which makes things trickier: We're limited to working a company that remotely hosts our LMS, meaning that we won't really have the option to establish mulitiple databases and fire off scheduled tasks without an aggregious amount of planning and negotiation.

I've been looking into group and cohort functionalities and I'm pretty sure they'll address our needs, albeit with a little more teacher-level interaction than I'd anticipated wink

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In reply to David Macara

Re: Staggered or delayed access to courses over a period of time.

by Mike Pietrzak -

I agree that this is functionality we need.


I just created a course and want people to be able to register/pay, but I do not want them to actually access the course content until a particular future date.  It seems that a potential solution would be to include a field in the settings -

Delay access for enrolled until [DATE].
In this way, whether a manual, self, or payment registration is made, the individual would be enrolled, but have no access.

It seems this would solve the situation with David's staggered access, as well as my "pay now/start later" issue.

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