Best practice forum (Archived)

Enrolling cohorts to programs: Notifications, course enrolment

 
Denise Mauss
Enrolling cohorts to programs: Notifications, course enrolment
by Denise Mauss - Thursday, 19 April 2012, 1:49 AM
 

Hello all,

I would like to automatically enrol a group of people to several courses and they should get a notification about it, as soon as they are enrolled. As far as I know, enrolling a whole cohort is just possible by using programs. But here are my problems:

  • When I enrol the cohort to a program, users don't get any email-notification about this, but when I look at the "My Learning" - "Required Learning" of the users, I see that they actually have been enrolled to the program. Why don't they get a notification?
  • Is it true, that after enrolling people into a program, they are still not really enrolled to the specific courses, but have to click on "Launch course" and manually enrol themselves first? This would be a problem for our customer, as he needs a report about how many people are enrolled in a specific course, but haven't completed it yet. In this case the people who were enrolled by the program but haven't clicked on the "Launch course" button yet, wouldn't show up in the report, right?

Thanks for your help,

Denise

Simon Coggins
Re: Enrolling cohorts to programs: Notifications, course enrolment
by Simon Coggins - Thursday, 19 April 2012, 8:17 PM
Group Totara

Hi Denise,

They should get an enrollment message as long as:

  • They have a valid email
  • Email for that user is enabled in their profile
  • Notifications are enabled on the 'Messages' tab in their profile 
  • The server is configured to send emails
As long as you are getting emails from other parts of the system (like forums) it seems likely there is a bug somewhere that's stopping them from being sent. Could you go to your Site Notifications page, and press the 'Download error log' button and send me the file?
For the second part, the way programs work is that they don't actually trigger the enrollment until the first time the user views the course. This is because some other people wanted the exact opposite of what you want - they didn't want all users appearing in the reports, only those that had actually gone to the course!
This is actually an issue that we seem to come up against a lot - different clients have very different requirements around what should happen with enrollments. I think we may need an additional status so we can distinguish between a course being "assigned" to a user, and a user actually having "started" the course. The difficulty then is how does the system know when someone has started!
One possible option to solve the problem for you might be to use the "Program Completion" report source as this will list users assigned to the program and their program completion status, but it doesn't break down the individual course completion statuses.
Simon
Denise Mauss
Re: Enrolling cohorts to programs: Notifications, course enrolment
by Denise Mauss - Wednesday, 25 April 2012, 5:14 AM
 

Hi Simon,

I checked all those four points and they should be ok. I also get course enrolment messages, so the email notifications from the system in general should be ok, too. Here's the error log of the system.

Thanks for your explanation about program enrolment. I think it would be a good thing to let the admin decide whether to enrol users to courses when assigning them to a program or when a users looks into to course the first time. Maybe there could be a checkbox or something when assigning users to programs, which lets you decide about this. As a start date of the course I would use the date of assignment to the program then, so basically it's still the course enrolment date then.

I'll keep the Program Completion report in mind, maybe that's okay for our customer.

Thanks for your help!

Denise

Simon Coggins
Re: Enrolling cohorts to programs: Notifications, course enrolment
by Simon Coggins - Thursday, 10 May 2012, 3:36 PM
Group Totara

Hi Denise,

Are you still having problems with your program emails not arriving? There's nothing obviously wrong with your error logs. Could you let me know which version of Totara you are using, and what database (mysql, postgres, mssql) it uses?

I'll see if I can reproduce the problem locally.

I think you're right that it would be good to provide options around when course enrolment happens within programs.

Simon

Denise Mauss
Re: Enrolling cohorts to programs: Notifications, course enrolment
by Denise Mauss - Wednesday, 16 May 2012, 1:34 AM
 

Yes, the problem still exists.

Version is 1.1.14 and database MySQL.

Thanks for your help,

Denise

Simon Coggins
Re: Enrolling cohorts to programs: Notifications, course enrolment
by Simon Coggins - Tuesday, 19 June 2012, 2:38 PM
Group Totara

Hi Denise,

I've tested this on MySQL and version 1.1.14 with individual users, static cohorts and dynamic cohorts and in all cases I get the emails as expected.

The only other thing I can think of is that you have a configuration problem with your mail, or the messages are getting marked as junk somewhere by your mail system (so they are being sent but not delivered).

Sorry I can't be of more help,

Simon

Martinique Johns
Re: Enrolling cohorts to programs: Notifications, course enrolment
by Martinique Johns - Friday, 8 March 2013, 9:50 AM
 

Is it possible to send a list of cohorts a welcome email via the system:

We are using Totara Version 1.1.21 (Build: 20120926.0).  We will sometimes need to send cohort members emails regarding course changes, program updates, etc.

I am unable to determine a way to batch send an email without using some custom code.

Can you advise?

~m