Tutorial: Start setting up your course

9. Give learners course access

Note: Giving learners course access is an important aspect of course set up but we advise you to complete the courses Add content to your Moodle course and Add activities to your Moodle course before enrolling learners. An empty course is not very motivating ;)

• How learners access your course depends on the policies of your institution and Moodle administrator.
• As a teacher you might be able to give learners access yourself, or this might be done by the admin.
• Click the Participants link from the Course navigation to see who is already in your course and then click Enrol users to see who is already in your course and to manually enrol others (if allowed).
• Click the Participants link and then Enrolment methods to explore other ways of giving learners access, for example Self-enrolment.

Giving learners course access

There are a number of ways in which your learners can access your course, for example your administrator might enrol them for you or they might be automatically enrolled from outside, or they might be able to create their own accounts on the Moodle site and then enrol themselves into your course.

Enrolment means how students get into your course whereas Authentication means how they get onto a Moodle site, which we do not look at here.

In this video we look at how you the teacher can manually add students to your course and how you can find out the other ways in which they can access your course.

If we click Participants from Course navigation, we see any participants already enrolled in the course and if there are a lot we and we can search and filter with several options.

If allowed, teachers can click the Enrol users button to manually add a student.

Note that as a course teacher you can't add other editing teachers unless allowed by admin.

From the dropdown, by selecting Enrolment methods we can see the different ways that they're able to access or be enrolled into a course.

The first one we see is called Manual enrolments.

This means that students can be enrolled into the course by the teacher.

Guest access here has its eye icon closed so that means that currently no guests can look at this course, but the teacher can enable it by clicking the icon.

Self-enrolment means that users can enrol themselves by clicking a button if we enable it by opening the eye.

If the admin has allowed other enrolment methods, you can access them from the dropdown.

Let's explore the options for self-enrolment by clicking the icon.

Here you can set a password or enrolment key and you can also amongst other options set a limit on the number of learners who can join the course .

Let’s enable self enrolment and follow student Barbara as she accesses the course.

She sees the Enrol button but first she has to enter the enrolment key - she does this and now can enrol in the course.