Cohorts: good tool for multi-organization structure?

Cohorts: good tool for multi-organization structure?

by E Martin -
Number of replies: 4

Our Moodle server is used by multiple schools. This has made it hard to manage accounts, as each school negotiates different policies on account management. Ex: how inactive should an account be before it is disabled or deleted?

Are cohorts the right tool for annotating which schools students belong to? We want to be able to answer queries "Show me all student accounts from Mulgrave Secondary from the 2019/20 academic year"

If this is not the right tool, are there other tools in Moodle designed for this use case?

If cohorts ARE appropriate.... is there any way to attach MULTIPLE cohorts to one account? So for example a student belongs to "MULGRAVE" and it also belongs to "FULLTIME" to indicate it's a full time student at Mulgrave secondary?

Thanks for your feedback.      (Moodle 3.6 - being updated to 3.10)

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In reply to E Martin

Re: Cohorts: good tool for multi-organization structure?

by Quintin Seegers -
Hi Eric,

I'd be interested in a solution for your situation as well. We have a similar situation were our courses are available to multiple external companies, but we need a way to 'group' employees by company.

Quintin
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In reply to Quintin Seegers

Re: Cohorts: good tool for multi-organization structure?

by E Martin -
We found cohorts were not really for stratifying access so much as allowing for coherent sets of course enrolments if a learner is in a given "program of multiple courses." Ex: student in "grade 8" cohort should be enrolled in all three classes "Physical Education 8" and "Math 8" and "Science 8" at once

Custom user profiles are what we used to annotate the external entity which controlled a student account. So we made a custom profile "external" which then was useful in allowing us to query for all students in institution A, all accounts in institution B, etc. Useful because you can then push student lists to an administrator in institution A and ask for an update.

https://docs.moodle.org/311/en/User_profile_fields

Maybe you can then make custom roles that are then given access only for a given context. So role "Administrator A" would only be able to access courses in the context of all courses in "folder "A" (which contains all the courses for company A)

https://docs.moodle.org/311/en/Creating_custom_roles
https://docs.moodle.org/311/en/Assign_roles

Well that's the idea that comes to my mind. If anyone else has more detailed insight or refinements, I'd love to know, I'm certainly not a Moodle permissions expert.
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In reply to E Martin

Re: Cohorts: good tool for multi-organization structure?

by Quintin Seegers -
We already track the company name as a custom user profile file. however, that doesn't give us the ability to bulk enrol users to a course. Cohorts might be our only option.

Quintin
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