Open and closed cohorts

1. Using open and closed cohorts

Most courses on OpenLearn Create are open for anyone to enrol on and complete without any barriers. However, some courses are set up for closed cohorts for a specific group of people to study, so are not open courses. On OpenLearn Create this is done by using a password called an enrolment key as a barrier to enrolment, and switching off guest access to the course, so the content cannot be seen by anyone who has not enrolled. Some activities such as quizzes will require enrolment for them to be viewed and completed, even if guest access is allowed.

There are various options for open and closed courses:

• Open cohort – anyone can enrol, anyone can see the course content without enrolling (open enrolment, guest access switched on, no need for an enrolment key). 
• Open enrolment – anyone can enrol, only those who have enrolled can see course content (open enrolment, guest access switched off, no need for an enrolment key). 
• Closed enrolment – a restricted group of people can enrol, anyone can see the course content without enrolling (enrolment key applied, guest access switched on). This combination is unusual.
• Closed cohort – a restricted group of people can enrol, only those who have enrolled can see course content (enrolment key applied, guest access switched off)

If a course is a closed cohort, it is better that it does not appear in the Free courses listing on the site because anyone finding it there and clicking on it for more information will get the enrolment key screen with no further information about the course or how to obtain the enrolment key. The only way to stop it from appearing in the free courses listing is to set it up in a private collection. Private collections do not appear in the Collections section of the website. They are set up for organisations who do not want their collection to be publicly available and are usually for a specific group of users. The private collection page can still be found by search engines but the content of closed cohort courses in the private collection cannot be found by search engines. A private collection can only be set up by an OLC manager.

2. Setting up an enrolment key

You need to have the ‘course manager’ role to be able to set up an enrolment key for your course and switch off guest access.

Setting up a course with an enrolment password

In the course, go to Course administration – OpenLearners – Enrolment methods.

Hide ‘self enrolment’ and ‘guest enrolment’ methods

Click on the editing button for ‘OpenLearn Enrolment so the editing form appears

Where it says ‘enrolment key’ insert the enrolment password for the course

Save changes

3. Groups and enrolment keys

You may wish to run the same course with several supported cohorts either at the same time or in successive groups, if the course content remains the same.

Use the groups function to set up each cohort, which will need a title, a cohort code, a description and a cohort enrolment key.

Create groups

Go to Course administration – OpenLearners – Groups

Click on ‘create group’

Give the group a name, an ID number, a description and an enrolment key. Try not to make the enrolment key easy to guess. Save the changes.

You can edit the group details by clicking on ‘edit group settings’.

4. Using group enrolment keys for enrolment

To set up the course to use the group enrolment keys rather than the course enrolment key:

Go to Course administration – OpenLearners – Enrolment methods

Hide ‘Self enrolment (OpenLearner)’ and Guest access. Click on the edit button for OpenLearn Enrolment.

Click on the editing button for ‘OpenLearn Enrolment' so the editing form appears

Where it says ‘enrolment key’ insert the enrolment password for the course (like the group enrolment keys, it should not be too easy to guess).

Set ‘use group enrolment keys’ to ‘Yes’. This will activate the group enrolment keys to use instead of the course enrolment key you have just entered (which is still needed as part of the settings but is not needed by the learners). Make sure the default assigned role is ‘OpenLearner’.

Save the changes.

The learners will only be able to enrol on the course with the enrolment key you send to them for their cohort. They will only need to use the enrolment key once, unless they unenrol themselves from the course accidentally and want to enrol again.

5. Restricting courses activities to cohort groups

For a course with several cohorts and one forum, it is possible to set the forum to have a separate forum space for each cohort group.

Go to the forum administration menu and expand the ‘common module settings’ dropdown. For group mode, select ‘separate groups’ (this means each group member can only see their own group, other groups are invisible). Click on Save and display.

You can use the group function for other course activities such as Choice (poll), Wiki, Glossary, Blog.

6. Manually adding a user to a group

A course manager can assign enrolled users into groups manually.

Go to course administration – OpenLearners

In the list of names of enrolled users is a column for ‘groups’. Click on the pencil icon which is ‘edit groups’ for that user and choose the appropriate group from the dropdown list which appears. Forum moderators can have more than one cohort group to moderate, whereas learners will usually only be in one cohort group, the one they were assigned to when they used the enrolment key during enrolment.

It is also possible to add or remove users from a cohort group via the Groups screen (which shows all the members of a group), by clicking on the group and using the ‘add/remove users’ button.

7. Notifying learners about enrolling on your course

Once your course has been published, if your course is open to anyone to enrol on, it will appear on the Free courses listing on the site, so you can partly rely on search engines finding the course or people visiting the site and searching the list for courses to study, though obviously you can also promote the course yourself.

If your course is a closed cohort course in a private collection, you will need to notify the learners about it yourself. You can put some information in the private collection page which explains how learners can obtain the enrolment key for the course they want to study. You can also send out an email from you or your organisation to a group of learners with the following information in the instructions:

1. Register an account (or if they already have an OU account, use that account)
2. Login to OpenLearn Create with their account.
3. Go to the course URL (which you will need to provide to them in the email) when logged in and insert the enrolment key in the enrolment screen. You will need to tell them the enrolment key in the message you send to them. Ask them not to share the enrolment key with anyone else.

If you have sent out an enrolment key to learners, you will need to monitor who has enrolled on the course.