WordPress – Moodle Course Enrolment Issues

For clients that run e-learning solutions that entail multiple platforms like WordPress and Moodle, it can become overwhelming and frustrating when issues occur. Not only do you need to troubleshoot one platform but multiple – what a headache. We hope to lessen and ease the headache with some tips and tricks to solving those issues. For this article specifically, we will pinpoint enrolment issues.

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Outline

• Common Symptoms and How to Troubleshoot

• Solutions

• Different Types of Enrolment Methods

• How to Bulk Add Enrolment Methods to Courses

• Benefits of Hiring Moodle Expert Developers

Common Symptoms and How to Troubleshoot

When it comes to an e-learning LMS that consists of two platforms like WordPress and Moodle, time can be of the essence. We understand both the admin or owner’s urgency as well as the user or consumer. A user may have purchased a course and is unable to access due to a variety of course enrolment issues. Delay on solving such issues can result in asking for a refund or complaints which can result in negative reviews for your platform. Here are a few common symptoms and how to troubleshoot to resolve them.

1. WooCommerce (Products Setup) – A user purchased a course and through the order wasn’t enrolled. You can troubleshoot this by doing a test order to ensure it’s not only user specific.
2. Edwiser Bridge (Enrolment Sync) – You’ve gone into the user profile to manually enroll the user into a course but it appears to not save or enroll. Test by enrolling other courses through WordPress to ensure it’s not user specific or product specific.
3. Moodle Course Enrolment Method – Check that the course you’ve set up has the correct enrolment method appropriate for your platforms.

Solutions

WooCommerce (Product Setup) – Ensure you’ve checked that you’ve attached the correct course in the WooCommerce Integration. This requires you to ensure you’ve got your courses synced to WordPress from Moodle.

Edwiser Bridge (Enrolment Sync) – Go to the user’s profile to check if the course is in the box on the right under “Search enrolled courses”. If this does not work even though your course and product are set up correctly, you will need to contact Edwiser Support (edwiser@wisdmlabs.com) as this relates to their plugin.
NOTE: When manually enrolling, we do recommend always enrolling through WordPress. The order you should keep in mind is WooCommerce -> WordPress -> Moodle. We’ve found the plugin run into the least bugs or errors this way.

Moodle Course Enrolment Method – More times than not, this is a key suspect to enrolment issues. You want to ensure that your courses has some sort of enrolment method set so that the Edwiser Bridge plugin is syncing the enrolment from WordPress. We will go into detail of the different types of enrolment methods in the next section.

Situations where we’ve seen this occur is when a client sets up an archive/database of courses for students to access. They had the parent course setup for enrolment while giving access to courses within through shared url. The enrolment issue occurred when a student tried to purchase a single course out of the archive/database. Due to students getting access through the parent course, the single course setting was overlooked.

As this was within an archive/database, you can assume that there was a large amount of single courses without the correct enrolment configuration. How to solve this? We will give a method to resolving this in the How to Bulk Add Enrolment Methods to Courses section.

Different Types of Enrolment Methods

Moodle offers various course enrolment methods, each designed to cater to different scenarios for adding users to courses. Here’s a list of common enrolment methods:

1. Manual enrolment – This method allows teachers or administrators to manually add users to a course. It’s useful for small classes or specific situations where automatic enrolment isn’t appropriate.
2. Self enrolment – Enables students to enroll in courses themselves, often requiring an enrolment key provided by the teacher. This method is ideal for courses that want to offer open access but still control entry.
3. Guest access – Allows users to access courses without having to enrol. This is suitable for courses that want to provide open, view-only access to course content without participant interaction.
4. Cohort sync – Automatically enrols all members of a cohort (a group of users) into a course. This is efficient for large-scale enrolments where users are organized into cohorts based on department, year, etc.
5. Category enrolments – This method allows users to be enrolled in all courses within a category. It’s useful for organizations with structured training paths that want to automate access to a series of courses.
6. Course meta link – Links enrolments in one course to another, allowing users enrolled in a “parent” course to be automatically enrolled in a “child” course. This is useful for managing enrolments across related courses or modules.
7. External database – Uses an external database to manage enrolments. This is ideal for institutions that already use an external system to track enrolments and want to synchronize this data with Moodle.
8. Flat file enrolment – Enrols users based on a CSV file uploaded to the server. This method is useful for bulk enrolment processes where enrolment data is prepared and managed offline.
9. PayPal enrolment – Allows for the selling of course access with payments processed via PayPal. This is useful for educators or institutions offering paid courses online.
10. Shared enrolment – Enables seamless learning across different courses or Moodle instances without separate enrolments for each. It’s used by organizations with multiple Moodle platforms to simplify user access and management, often involving integrations like synchronizing user databases or using Single Sign-On (SSO) systems.

How to Bulk Add Enrolment Methods to Courses

The method to resolving an enrolment issue related to enrolment methods can be simple but time consuming. In the case that a bulk add of enrolment methods is necessary, we can assume the number of courses is substantial. Going into each course to add an enrolment method can be tedious. Though our method may seem a bit difficult, if you have access to your database – this will be quite simple. If you have a range of 20-50 courses with enrolment method issues, you could manually correct it. We do recommend if it’s any amount about 50, a SQL query will save you significant amount of time.

Firstly, we use a SQL script to find the categories specific to the parent course. Always do your due diligence in ensuring you are grabbing the correct information from the correct tables, because applying changes can cause errors when done incorrectly.

• It selects courses in the category range of 10 to 1000, mirroring the logic of the initial SELECT query (what you see above).
• For each course that doesn’t already have a manual enrolment method (enrol = ‘manual’), inserts a new record into the mdl_enrol table.
• The NOT EXISTS clause ensure that a manual enrolment method is added only if it doesn’t already ecist for the course, preventing duplicate enrolment methods.

We trust this article has offered insights into troubleshooting and addressing course enrolment issues between WordPress and Moodle LMS platforms. We’re eager to provide further consultation on this or any other Moodle-related matters. As experts in Moodle, our goal is to ensure educators across all areas are confident in the LMS service they deliver to their learners.