Roles and permissions

Hi Ben,

No secret about who I work for - it's Capita Learning & Development... They're doing a lot of work within Service Birmingham. I helped SB get started with their internal Moodle and now do occasional bits of consultancy within Birmingham around Moodle.

Just to make clear about the enrolment key idea. Each school will have their own private key, which is reused in conjunction with the courses enrolment key - which means the final key is the combination of the two. It's not totally secure, as schools could, in theory, let others know their key. But it's certainly a lot less of a headache than other enrolment methods.

You're worried about individuals having to enrol for each course individually... but how many courses will each person want to enrol on? You could use metacourses to group courses together if you wanted to - but it would become very complicated (and messy) very quickly. Especially trying to get people into the right groups.

You're right that the other solution is to have an external back end DB. This is how large educational institutions (eg. colleges) would manage enrolments. They would usually have an MIS system that then controls access to the Moodle courses. You might want to ask City College or South Birmingham college how they've approached this.

However, college MIS systems are expensive, and not really appropriate for your needs. Instead you're looking for a simpler training MIS - which doesn't exist as far as I know... (Gap in the market there!)

All the best,

Mark