(photo by Benjamin Ellis)

One of Solution Grove's clients that uses Moodle as an infrastructure for their online courses recently expressed the need to expand the user registration process in a number of custom ways.  We have previously created an ecommerce registration module based on dotLRN for Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Boston Museum of Science.  Our existing system is open source and supports a wide range of customizable use cases.  We decided the best way to meet our clients' need was to integrate the dotLRN registration and Moodle.

The result is an incredible ability to support complex and custom student registration requirements. This post will be the first in a series of posts that outlines the different requirements needed by our clients and the solutions we used to answer and solve them.

Requirement No. 1:  Students enroll for a course and the teacher approves their applications.

In stock Moodle, only the user accounts are set for manual approval but when applying for a course, users can only either enroll automatically or use a pre-defined enrollment key, depending on the settings for the course.  In this case we want the students to create an account and indicate their desire to enroll in the course.  Each teacher can then decide if they want to accept the student into the course.

The Solution:

We created a course catalog package that supports both open enrollments and enrollments that require approval.  From the catalog, students may select a course and apply for it.

Teachers can either approve or reject applications using, as their basis, the information that students submit when they applied for course.  Teachers may view these information through a View link that displays the student information.

Like teachers, students are also notified about the status of their applications, whether their applications have been approved or rejected.  In both cases, an email will be sent to the student stating the reason for the approval or rejection of the application.  Unlike the notifications sent to the teachers, the notifications that students receive can be configured.  Thus, teachers may add to or change the pre-defined reason or message that will be sent to the student.

Benefits:

This allows us to have a better granularity with regards to teacher permissions.  It allows us to have a more flexible application process which gives teachers more control over the applications for their course(s) .