Its nice to know there are others in this world or should I say US who are also troubled by this spelling. Its intersting to note that Microsoft Office spellcheck acknowledges the enrolment spelling as correct, though it will flag enrol.
Anyway, thanks for posting your thoughts on this. I'd love to see a resolve to this issue myself, especially since our clients may wonder what kind of program we are recommending to them when something so basic is "misspeled" 
.
thanks. perhaps one of the L's fell off into the sea during the long journey from Ingland to Awlstraleea.
In the past I have suggested en be changed to en_br. Nontheless it is easy to change the language to en_us. This is a matter of choice and emphasis, not right and wrong. The whole world actually doesn't revolve around the U.S. - there are many standard varieties of English and none of them are right or wrong.
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Any good quality dictionary these days will show both spellings, with a usage label indicating that enrolment is Britsh English usage and enrollment is US English usage.
when something so basic is "misspeled"
You couldn't even take the time to look this up in a dictionary? You just jump to the conclusion that the spelling is wrong?
Its intersting to note that Microsoft Office spellcheck acknowledges the enrolment spelling as correct, though it will flag enrol.
The fact that Microsoft Office, when the proofing language is set as American English, doesn't flag enrolment as wrong didn't make you think twice about considering this a mistake?
I'd love to see a resolve to this issue myself, especially since our clients may wonder what kind of program we are recommending to them
The solution is a simple as http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=34719#161046
You obviously didn't take the time to look for the solution before deciding to call it a misspelling.
It annoys me when ignorant Americans assume they own the English language, and consider everything that is different as wrong. The fact is that English is an international language with a number of standard varieties, not just one, and the differences should be accepted as less common alternatives in all varieties unless they impair understanding. In the case where one has to be selected, such as in the language packs in Moodle, then of course the more common or standard alternative will be used. Then just change the language setting to the one you need.
According to Google, there are about 45,800,000 occurrences of the word "enrollment" and 10,400,000 occurrences of the non-word "enrolment" on the Internet. If I recall correctly, we "ignorant" Americans defeated the British during the American Revolution. And had it not been for us (the U.S.), the British would now be speaking German and the Australians would be speaking Japanese.
I'm sure your fellow Americans will be proud of you. << sarcasm in case you are wondering
Now, is that "trol" or "troll"?
Old thread, but interesting reading. I don't think the Brits would have made it to Stalingrad without the Americans having breached Normandy and other parts of the Contenent's coast. And, as an American, I believe we waited way too long to get involved and help our friends. I think we all have learned that lesson too well.
Enrolment vs. Enrollment
Colour vs. Color
Pretentious vs. Arrogant
As an arrogant American, I tip my hat to you pretentious chaps across the sea...oh yeah, and the Australians (I hear they had something to do with Moodle).
-Jeff
Well, Tim Allen, you've proven that smugness, a penchant for cyber-bullying, and angry hypersensivity aren't characteristics isolated to Americans. Maybe the person who was trying to change the spelling of enrol to enroll is, say, a US 5th grade teacher, catering to an exclsuivley American audience of kids, and wants to teach these kids the American spelling.
Of course, now, thanks to your contributions to this forum, she can also teach her 5th graders how to easily tweak self-righteous English-speaking foreigners.
Besides if the spelling variation bothers you so much one solution would be to simply not use moodle. Additionally If I recall both Britain and Australian educational systems are a bit more successful than the US educational system. I'm with them.
On one last note if your using this in the classroom and students ask about the differences in spelling doesn't this afford the instructor with a great opportunity to teach language in a way that is interesting and culturally informative to students, they are bound to see these spellings in real life, why not expose them to it in an educational way? I think this might be a more effective way to open a dialog with students on grammar verses static unrealistic worksheets. It might also enable teachers to talk about language and how it evolves based on usage.
Well said Chad! The first time I used moodle, the spelling bothered me and then I started thinking about how I can use this spelling as an opportunity to teach...
Change your language setting from en to en_us.
I have not had success with the consistent US spelling of "enrol" even with the language setting set to en_us. I have tried it with Moodle 1.7 and 1.8.3+ which both function the same relative to language setting and "enrol".
When logged in as a site administrator the only time enroll is displayed instead of enrol is after I set the Language setting = en_us AND Language editing = en_us. Once the adminstrator is logged out and logged back in the Language editing must be reset to en_us for enroll to be displayed. When logged in as a student and the site language setting verified to be en_us via "display the general-purpose language menu on the home page" I have never seen enroll displayed.
From this thread it seems this works for everyone else so what could possibly be different in our installation?
Thanks.
The problem is caused by the user profile language setting overriding the site setting. My profile had "en" as its preferred language. Changing this to "en_us" made "enroll" stick!
This was the same problem I had - User profile settings overriding the site settings for language. I have about 275 users currently - is there a way to change all users language profile settings to en_us as the administrator - this would save me from having to help each of them change their own settings. - thanks for any help.
Thanks for any help in advance!
Also, I loved reading this discussion and I shared it with the literacy teachers in my American middle school hoping that the teachers might be able to use it as a "real life" example of the use of the word ignorance.
UPDATE mdl_user SET lang='en_us_utf8' WHERE lang='en_utf8'
I show segments to my classes occasionally, and they learn something about their language they did not understand - it changes. So get over it and move on. Oh and for you who really believe that the US saved the world from the Nazis and Japanese, stop watching John Wayne movies and read a real history book. You might actually learn something.
"UPDATE mdl_user SET lang='en_us_utf8' WHERE lang='en_utf8'"
This is the only thing that works without having to tell users to select their own default language. The only thing I will add is to cover subsequent new users you can edit the mdl_user table in phpMyAdmin and change the default lang column value to en_us_utf8.
Tim, thank you for this info. Very helpful. I was able to update just the guest role in my moodle and appease my customer.
UPDATE mdl_user
SET lang = "en_us_utf8"
WHERE username like "guest"
I've installed the en_us language pack and set it as default. I've also purged the cache. But I'm still not seeing the correct US spelling. For example when I go to the course administration page and look at the user list the button still says "enrol" users. Is there something else I need to do in order to make the en_us spelling changes actually take effect on the site?
Update: ironically, reading through this thread again, I see that we ran into the same problem back in 2010 when we installed Moodle 1.9. I wish now I'd made better notes on how we fixed the problem then because I'm having no luck at all this time around. Nothing I do seems to have any effect on the spelling.
I'm able to duplicate this problem on demo.moodle.net - I installed the en_us language pack, made it the default, purged the cache, then went to the course administration page and still see "enrol" - so either there's a bug or I'm definitely missing some crucial step in switching languages.
Did you change it in your own user profile yet?
When user profiles are created they inherit the system default language in place at the time of their creation. Changing the system default does not update the language setting for already existing users. (Which admin always is
This is true of user profile defaults in general, and works for users in the same way as course defaults work for courses. It is basically a template, not a method to do updates.
Bummer - does that mean I have to change the language for every user and every course individually? I had assumed changing it in site administration would actually change it site wide. It could takes hours to change all the users and courses one at a time.
Steve,
For users, yes, you have to update them one by one.
(Unless you have access directly to the database where you could do a mass change of mdl_user.lang from en to en_us, or whatever value you need. But there's no way to mass do this via the interface.)
Courses are a bit different: hopefully you left courses at the default setting of "Do not force."
If so, that means that courses inherit the user's language setting, since what that setting means is you are not forcing it to be a specific language. If you fix the user setting, then courses will be fine without needing to change anything.
However, if you have set a specific language for a course, that setting forces the course to override the user language setting. In that case, you are in the same situation as before and would need to change it per course. (Again, this could be mass updated in the database directly.)
Sadly, it turns out you do have to manually change every user and course one at a time. Every course now has the language forced to en_us and I spent most of the evening logging in as each user and forcing their language to en_us. It was not enough to change just the users. Regardless of the site wide default set at en_us and a user's own language being set to en_us, each course still shows the language that was in force when it was created. The only way I could find to modify it was to use the course administration "force language" setting. But forcing it did correct the problem.
So the site now displays the correct language for everyone but it's a very frustrating issue to have to deal with for new Moodle users. It would be nice if there were some sort of warning or option during installation to select the correct language. I think a good start would be to rename the default language from "en" to "en-uk" or something like that so American users will know that it's not the language they think it is. Or make it an obvious step in the documentation that the default language must be selected BEFORE creating users and classes. Or provide some method in the admin side to actually made a site-wide default language change.
It may be possible to make this change in bulk via CSV upload. You would set the upload to "Update existing users." I have not tried updating, but I set the lang column to en_us for all new user uploads, and it sticks in their profiles.
That will work, yes. If you have the required fields and set everything just right. Just need to be careful of the settings so you don't inadvertently change things like passwords when you don't mean too
Personally, I always do this in the database, since it is so much easier and quicker and - in this case - safer.
Much of it can be changed by editing the files in lang/en_utf8/. I did this in Dreamweaver. I understand that "enrol" is a correct spelling, but it looks funny to most of us dopey Americans, as do "colour" and "maneuvre".
Chacun à son goût!
1. Admin -> Lanuage -> Language Packs - I installed the en_us language pack
2. Admin -> Language -> Language Settings - I switched the default language to en_us
This had no effect for any user on the system, enroll is still spelled as "enrol"
I also tried unchecking the "Language Autodetect" in case that was overriding the selected language. This had no effect. Enroll is still spelled as "enrol"
I restarted apache in case it's a caching problem. Still nothing, it's still "enrol".
Any other suggestions? I'm thinking it can't be this complicated, I must have left out a step somewhere...