Totara Learn Open Discussions

Copy all enrollment settings, including audiences added to groups

Welcome to this forum!

Hi community,

I am looking for a way to be able to copy ALL enrollment settings of a course to an existing (or new) course (including the link between an audience and a group).

Our situation is as follows:

We have about 200 audiences. For example: 'School A - Class 1', 'School A - Class 2', 'School B - Class 1', et cetera.
Every single audience is enrolled in about 150 courses.
Every single audience needs to be added to its own group (role is 'user'), so you get about 200 groups per course. The groupnames are identical to the audiencenames, thus 'School A - Class 1', 'School A - Class 2', 'School B - Class 1', et cetera. The reason for this setup has to do with progress rapports and insights for teachers at the deepest level (individual answers by individual students for every course/test/quiz).

Importing the names of the groups is not much work, but linking every audience to the right groupname is (200 clicks per course with a high-risk of making errors, because of selecting the wrong groupname). Furthermore, it has to be repeated for every course (~150), making it an overall task of >100 hours.

We are looking for a way to improve this process, but we've had little succes so far. Importing or copying settings from a course where we did all the work manually, to a course where the link between audience and group has not yet been performed, only results in the addition of the ~200 groupnames. The part we are most interested in: a link between the audiencename and the groupname, is not included in the settings/import/restore back-up. This is really frustrating.

We would be enormously grateful if there is any work-around to this problem. Thank you in advance for sharing your ideas and suggestions.

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Hi Lennert

If you are using an audience to enrol members in a course then this will create and audience sync enrolment method in the course.

The audience sync enrolment method can be edited to create a new group (the group name is the audience name by default)

I also tried using the backup and restore course with user data with groups ticked and the new course included the audience sync with groups so once set up for one course you can use to restore into the new courses.

Test this out and see if this works for you.

See the Audience sync docs for more detail

Regards

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Hi Craig,

Thank you for your response and advice.

With regard to your suggestion that the new group name is by default the audience name is partially correct (at least for us). For example: my audience name is 'School A - Class 1', the group name will be called by default 'School A - Class 1 - site-wide groups'. It somehow adds the term 'site-wide groups' automatically. It could have to do with my settings? I don't want it to show, because it looks ugly and onprofessional to our customers.

With regard to the restore backup; you are right that when groups are ticked, the new course will indeed include the audience sync with groups. So that works, thanks for verifying that.

However, - and I have tested this - when you restore a backup with those settings in an existing course where audiences have already been enrolled, it will not sync the groups. It will however create groups, but it will not sync the enrolled audiences with the groups. Somehow, this step is skipped during the restore backup process.
If no audiences are enrolled in the course, the restore backup will 1) enroll audiences, 2) create groups and 3) sync the audiences with the groups.

The problem with this is that in our case, we have about 150 courses where we already enrolled all audiences. For those courses, this restore backup will not help our case. Unless there is a way to remove audiences in bulk from courses, but I have yet to find that option. Any other suggestion would be appreciated.

Apologies for my English sometimes, I'm no native speaker but I hope my struggles are well explained.

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Hi Lennert

Thanks for testing this out in more detail. I tried this in Totara 12 and the Audience sync with groups was copied to the restored course. The members were also synced - when I added an audience member they were added to both courses.

Can you confirm what version of Totara you have and also that you selected to backup groups and users.

There is a delay in processing the audience enrolments as the enrolment_cohort task needs to be run which is hourly by default

Can you also confirm that the restored course has the audience sync enrolment method?

The group names for me were 'name of audience' audience . I am not sure what a site wide group mans , it is my understanding that groups are applied at at course level.

Regards

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Hi Craig,

Thanks again for looking into this. We are also using Totara 12 and the settings you mention were selected. I have no explanation as to why our outcomes differ. We also reached out to our local Totara-implementation partner by now, and they confirmed that we used the right settings. They did provide us with an alternative solution that will save us some time so we have gone with that.

Thanks again for your help and insights. Cheers!

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