Totara Learn Open Discussions

Audience sync enrollment method disappear upon course edit

 
Carla Bradley
Audience sync enrollment method disappear upon course edit
par Carla Bradley, Tuesday 3 November 2020, 12:15
 
One of my staff members updated a course description today, and then our help desk was flooded with calls from users who had lost access to the course. After some testing we realized that updating the course description removed the audience syncs. Then I tested changing the course category -- this also removed all audience syncs. I'm not sure whether any "edit course" action would strip the audience sync. I'd have to do some more testing. But it seems like almost any "edit course" action strips all audience syncs. 


This makes me wonder -- is this something OUR system is doing, or does Totara do this by design? We are using 11.2, and I supposed it's possible one of our plugins is causing Totara to behave differently than designed, but it would really help me decide our next steps if I knew for certain whether core Totara installations behave this way. If it's something Totara does by design, is this function updated in Version 12 or 13, or does the removal of audience syncs occur in those versions as well? We will be updating to 12 soon. (We are self-hosted).

Tom Wood
Re: Audience sync enrollment method disappear upon course edit
par Tom Wood, Tuesday 10 November 2020, 04:55
Groupe Totara

Hi Carla,

Thanks for raising this interesting scenario - the behaviour you've described sounds very strange and not something by design.

It would not normally be expected that the enrolment of audiences should be affected by editing of the course description.

However there is a scenario where the changing of the course category might affect audiences. One thing definitely worth checking is the following:

Have the affected audiences been created at the category context? (You can check this by editing the audience and seeing what's been set in the "Context" field).

Has a category context been set here or is it "System"?

If it's not a system audience, when you edited the course and changed the course's category it's probable that it no longer matches the audience context. This then means that members of the audience will no longer be able to access the course.

Edit Audience

To solve the problem you'd need to do one of three things:

  1. Edit the audience context so it's a system wide audience
  2. Edit the audience context so it's new category matches the category that course now sits in
  3. Edit the course and change the category back so it matches the audience context
I expect that given the scenario you'll probably choose option 1 or option 2. When you do this please note that you may need to wait a few minutes for the audience sync to re-apply (depending on timing of cron/scheduled tasks).

Hopefully this explains it! (If not, please let us know)

Thanks

Tom


Carla Bradley
Re: Audience sync enrollment method disappear upon course edit
par Carla Bradley, Thursday 12 November 2020, 07:12
 

Thank you so much! You're telling us that it was unexpected allowed us to narrow our research and we found a plugin that was interferring. Thanks again!