6. Understanding Course Enrollments

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Your course is populated automatically based upon our Bionic registration system information. In addition to registered students, your course may have students that self-enroll during drop/add, AAs that provide course support, and others that are manually enrolled.

Haverford and Bryn Mawr students should appear in your course roster within 15 minutes of registering on Bionic.

Swarthmore students may take a few days to appear in your roster because the Registrar needs to first add them into our system. Once registration is complete, our system assigns Swarthmore students an account on our Moodle server and sends an email message alerting them to their account access information.

You can use Moodle to get a photo roster of your course. You may also grant course viewing, editing, or grading privileges to members of the bi-college community.

WARNING: Even though students are enrolled in your courses, students will ONLY SEE YOUR COURSE if you make your course visible via the Course Settings menu.

Automated Enrollments/Drops

Your Moodle course roster is generated from our Bionic registration system and automatically updated every 15 minutes. You cannot change the enrollments sent from the Bionic system.

View Course Participants

Select the Participants menu under the course name.

illustration of Moodle Participant Menu

You now see a list of students, instructors, AAs, and others that have access to the course. It may also include people without an active role in the class; such people may have been in the class previously, but do not have access rights now.

illustration of participant list and options assossiated with that list

The participant list provides several options for finding and viewing those enrolled in your class. These options are marked on the illustration above as follows:

Select just those with the name or user role you want. For example, to see only those students officially enrolled in your class, from the first drop-down menu match any role with “Register Student“
You can narrow down the list, by selecting the first letter of the first or last name.
You can sort according to First name, Last name, Email address, Groups, or Last access to course.

Note: Those with registered student or auditing student roles can only see Names, Roles, and Groups in the participant list.

Student Access to Courses

Moodle assigns privileges according to Moodle roles. Students sent from the Bionic system are given the Moodle role "Registered student". If you think enrolled students are missing from your Moodle roster, check to see whether they appear on the Bionic roster. If not, you will need to follow up with the student or with the Registrar. If students are in Bionic and not Moodle, follow up with hc-techlearn.

As explained earlier, you must make your course visible to students before students will see your course site.

Special access options at the start of the semester

Bryn Mawr and Haverford students can self enroll in your course, even if they are not yet enrolled through Bionic. This allows students to participate fully in Moodle course activities during the drop/add period.

14 day self enrollment is ON by default during drop/add period.
14 day self enrollment is OFF by default after drop/add period.

These self enrollments will expire after 14 days. At that time, students that are not formally enrolled after drop/add will lose access to your course.

This policy was put into effect as of Spring 2020. It replaces the previous policy of opening courses to guest access at the start of each semester, which only allowed access to course readings and other passive resources.

NOTE: Swarthmore students cannot self enroll. Please encourage all students, especially Swarthmore students, to formally register as soon as possible.

Add/change/remove course access

When students add or drop courses via the Bionic registration system, they are almost immediately enrolled or unenrolled in your Moodle site. You can see your roster via the participant list. As noted above in the section on special enrollment options at the start of the semester, during the drop/add period students can self enroll for temporary access to your course site.

Students coming from the Bionic system are enrolled as “Registered students”; a special role that you cannot control. Moodle will let you add or drop “Auditing students” to your course via the enroll user tab. Registered students and auditing students are very similar in terms of their access privileges.

To add, change, or remove course access

Select the Participants menu under the course name.
Click the Enroll users button.
You should see this enrollment window.
You can select one or more users at a time. To find a user, just enter a name or email address. It works best to enter just part of a first name or last name. Moodle will find only names containing the exact character string you type, and people’s names might be listed slightly differently than expected. In the illustration below, we searched for “John” and found many name matches. One “John” is selected, and we are about to select another.
By default, any user you enroll will be given the “auditing student” role. If you want to assign a different role, such as the “TA” role, select that role from the Assign role option. The available roles, and their associated privileges, are listed at the bottom of this page. Note that you may need to delete text from the search field (illustrated above) to see the role options.
Once you have enrolled the course participants you want, click the enroll user button.
You will now see your newly enrolled users in your participant list.

Change permissions for an existing course participant

You can easily change permissions of those enrolled in your course, provided you have access to change their particular role.

Select the Participants menu under the course name.
Find the names of those that you want to change. Click on the pencil icon to change details of their enrollment.
Remove roles that you no longer want by clicking on the "x" icon (illustrated below as item 1); add roles you want by clicking on the drop-down icon (illustrated below as item 2).
Save your changes by clicking on the little disk icon.

Remove permissions for an existing course participant

You can easily remove permissions of those enrolled in your course, provided you have access to change their particular role.

Select the Participants menu under the course name.
Find the names of unwanted course participants. Click on trash icon to remove them from your participant list.

Enable Self Enrollment

You can let users self enroll in your course as auditing students. By default, self enrollments expire after 14 days. At that time the self enrolled user will be dropped from your Moodle participant list. To enable self-enrollment:

Select the Participants menu under the course name.
From the Enrollments drop-down menu in the upper left, select Enrollment methods.
You will get another menu with enrollment options. Enable self-enable self-enrollments by clicking to toggle the eye icon to show.

What types of access rights can you assign? Moodle access roles

The list below explains the Moodle roles that can be assigned in a course.

Teacher: Teachers can do anything within a course, including changing the activities and grading students.
Non-editing teacher: Non-editing teachers can teach in courses and grade students, but may not alter activities.
Course Builder: Course Builders are similar to the teacher role, but do not have access to grades. Those with the Teacher role can assign this role. Teachers can assign someone a Grader role, on top of the Course Builder role, to allow grading and content editing.
Grader: Graders can grade but have no other special access. Those with the Teacher role can assign this role. Teachers can assign someone a Course Builder role, in addition to the Grader role, to allow grading and content editing.
TA: The TA role has similar privileges to the registered student role, but does not show up in the grade book. Those with the Teacher or Course Builder role can assign this role. Teachers who want to give TAs extra privileges can add the roles of Course Builder and/or Grader.
Registered Student: Registered students are sent via the automated registration system. Such students are formally registered for your course and cannot be manually added or deleted.
Auditing Student: Auditing Students have the same Moodle course privileges as Registered Students, but are not enrolled via Bionic. Teachers and Course Builders can add and remove auditing students in courses.
Guest: Guests have minimal privileges and usually can not enter text anywhere. This role is rarely used.