I think the Moodle enrolment plugin architecture is written this way for performance reasons. The thinking was probably: As long as a user has access under one enrolment plugin then that is enough, there's no need to check all plugins and add multiple records to user_enrolments. It is also for performance reasons that we do not automatically add program plugin enrolments when users are assigned to a program - we have customers assigning programs to Audiences containing tens of thousands of users which would kill any server.

It is really only an issue if the Guest plugin is enabled and comes before the Program (or indeed any other) plugin in the list - then they'll enter the course as a guest and so no completion data will be tracked.

I think a better way to do this may be to check all plugins *except* Guest first - in this way if they have access under any of the other plugins they will arrive in the course as an enrolled authenticated user and completion tracking will begin. Then if Guest plugin is enabled, and no other plugin works, check the Guest plugin as a last resort.

Hi Amir,

I understand your perspective on this, however there are also other factors at play that may not apply for you but do impact on other clients using this feature.

If we were to just straight enrol users in all courses that a program makes accessible to them at the moment they are assigned to the program there would be a few consequences:

• Every course would appearing in the user's record of learning.
• If "Course completion begins on enrollment" is enabled (the default), a "not yet started" completion record would be created.

Now imagine a situation where the first courseset includes 10 courses, but the user is only expected to complete any one of the 10. If we auto-enrol them in all 10 (to give them access to them all) they will have a lot of unwanted courses appearing, with "not yet started" statuses messing up their reports.

This was a genuine problem and the reason why we need to enrol users when they go to access the course instead of immediately.

The choice to use an enrolment plugin to handle this in 2.2+ was (as you say) because of the introduction of enrolment plugins in 2.x, and makes sense because often organisations do want people to be able to enrol in courses even if they aren't assigned via a program. This approach gives the most flexibility on a course-by-course basis.

I don't believe you will have problems if just the "manual" or "self" enrollment method before program since a user's enrolment doesn't normally depend on the method, it just goes through each method from the top and enrols them as soon as the first plugin allows it. Access and completion should work the same independent of enrollment method.

From what I can tell, the problem you are having is that when the "guest" enrolment plugin is active and above the "program" enrolment plugin. That's because Guest access that is a bit of a special case - users are being given guest privileges instead of being fully enrolled and therefore completion is not working.

The fact that this happens has nothing to do with the program enrolment plugin, it's a moodle issue. You can see this yourself as follows:

• Create a course with "guest" as the first enrolment method, and "manual" enrolment as the second.
• Manually enrol a user.
• Visit the course as that user. They will be given guest access only.