Enrolling Cohorts from Sub-Categories

Enrolling Cohorts from Sub-Categories

by Brian Gaehring -
Number of replies: 2

Good morning,

I have a question regarding managing Cohorts in 2.4.My site is set up like a University, with several Sub-Categories (schools), each with their own groups of category cohorts.The school admins manage their respective cohorts.Each course that the school creates can Cohort Sync from the list of that school's cohorts.That has all been running fine. (Restricting access to only cohorts within their school.)

Now the snag.The university wants to create some site-wide courses that can be accessed by individuals from any school.For example, a course called New Orientation, that will be available to anyone in the Math101 cohort (in School 1 Category), Psych101 cohort (in School 2 Category), etc.

I tried creating the course on the University level, but it cannot see any cohorts listed on sub-category (school) levels.

Course categories

University Category (Only a few system level cohorts, hidden from view of the school admins)

New Orientation Course

-----School 1 SubCategory(Contains Cohorts for the school of Math)

Math 101 course

...

-----School 2 SubCategory (Contains Cohorts for the school of Psych)

Psych 101 course

...

It seems that a course can only look up the tree of categories to use Cohorts, in this case only University level cohorts.It cannot see any cohorts listed in sub-categories.(Maybe this is a setting somewhere that I have not yet found.If so, please direct me to where it is.)

Since the students are all enrolled into their category cohorts by the school admins, I would prefer to not have to create distinct cohorts for these general courses.Is there any way to reference a cohort that is listed in a sub-category?

Thanks,

Brian

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In reply to Brian Gaehring

Re: Enrolling Cohorts from Sub-Categories

by Brian Gaehring -

Any thoughts on this question?

Alternately, is it possible to create virtual cohorts on the system level which point to the actual cohort lists which reside in the category level?

For example, Math101Copy on the system level points to Math101 cohort within the School1 Sub-category.That way, the school1 admins could continue adding/removing people from their school's cohorts, which would automatically transfer over to the site-wise general cohorts for the general courses.

Remember, our main concern is a school Admin only seeing the people in their school and no one in another school. Hence the cohorts on the category level.

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In reply to Brian Gaehring

Re: Enrolling Cohorts from Sub-Categories

by John Gifford -

Hi Brian

I don't know if this will be any use to you but I've just read a similar sounding setup to yours that was suggested in 2011. https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=166163

If I've got this right Mary Cooch was saying that instead of using cohorts at the category level you create your cohorts at the site level. The category and courses then use groups and the "auto create group" function will allow you to create a group from a given cohort as a dropdown option.

Please understand I haven't tried this, we don't use cohorts at all, so I may be entirely wrong or creating you a headache but is this maybe what you are looking for? I don't know how you would deal with a new student whether it would give your school level admins access to set a new student into their group and then this would become picked up by the cohort or it maybe that a new student would have to be added to the cohort and then filter down to the group. It would also mean that the school admins would have to be trusted to include the right cohort in their group, so maths wouldn't rather than couldn't add the psych cohort.

At least that's how I interpret what that discussion concluded.

John Gifford

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