I use the excellent Invitation plugin maintained by Michael Milette to email both registered and non-registered students a simple way to join a course. If they don't already have a registration they are cued to create one and enrolled in the course automatically. This works well for indivdual courses.
But I'm wondering whether anyone is aware of a parallel tool that would create email invitations to join a cohort? I can imagine it working in much the same way as the invitation plugin, with an email sent with an opt-in step for users. The idea is that I would then simply using the "Cohort Synch" enrolment method to give those users access to a group of courses.
Yes, I am aware that I could use the bulk new-user functionality to create/udate the required user records by CSV file, but I don't want to give that level of admin access to the category-level managers. Right now managers of categories can create, modify, or delete cohorts and can add or remove users who are already in the system, but this doesn't work for users who have not already been registered. Something where they could just dump a bunch of email address into a box and select the cohorts (based on the manager's permissions) and that would send an invitation email would be ideal.
Ideas?