Moodle and Web 2.0

On our training events, we are regularly asked about removing students once they have completed a course. This can be for a variety of reasons but often it is simply a case of wanting to only display current learners in the grade book and other grade data areas (e.g. quiz attempts table, SCORM attempts table, etc.) rather than all enrolled learners, as these areas can become unwieldy with pages of data relating to learners who finished the course the previous year.

This scenario is not quite as straight-forward as it may first appear. As the grade data areas always show learners who are enrolled in the course, unenrolling them from the course will also remove them from the grade data areas. This process can be achieved automatically by using the enrolment duration in the enrolment method which would unenrol learners after a certain time in the course.

While it is preferable that all learners are not displayed in the gradebook, the drawback to unenrolling the learners is that typically their data is not retained either, and teachers are therefore unable to look back at the grades for unenrolled learners. The solution here is to suspend course learners rather than unenrolling them; this will prevent course access to those learners whilst still retaining the ability for teachers to filter their grade results in the gradebook for their own analysis.

I am sure we will all agree, Cohorts are pretty handy. Recently a new client of mine asked me to do a bulk upload of about 100 users. Once uploaded, the client asked me to add them to a Cohort. No problem. There was only about 110 users on the site, so picking the 100 I needed was easy.

A few days later, I got a similar request. Upload a bunch of users, and then add them to a new Cohort. Suddenly it wasn’t as much fun. Finding and adding them proved to be a little trickier than the first time.

So I decided to tinker about with some code and see what I could come up with.