Access to courses
Access to courses can be controlled in a number of slightly different ways. From a tutors point of view these different methods are slightly confusing, however, students need not worry about this aspect of moodle. If you think you should have access to a course, but are prevented, contact the tutor for that course. As background for the interested reader, the following provides a brief overview:
- In moodle terminology, a user is "enrolled" for a course either by their tutor/school or in some cases a user can enrol them self onto a course. An enrolled user may fully participate in a course, such as join in with any forums discussions, submit exercises, and generally participate in any of the interactive moodle tools.
- In addition, some courses can be configured to also allow "guest access". Non-enrolled users can access such courses as "guest users", but will only have read permission, and therefore can't actively participate in activities such as forum discussion.
- In both cases, a tutor may configure site access to be protected by means of a special password known as an enrolment key. An enrolment key is usually set by a course tutor to control enrolment to their course only to those students the tutor chooses to give the key to.
- Finally, in all cases, a course site can be configured to completely block any new user enrolment or restrict new enrolment to a particular date period.
If in doubt, if you want to look at a particular course site, try to access it. Moodle will advise of any access restrictions that may be in place.
In the list of courses available from the moodle home page, you can get an indication of what type of access a course has by looking at the icons next to the course name. The following table explains what they mean:
| Course icon set |
Meaning of icon set * |
|---|---|
  |
Any registered moodle user can enrol on the course. |
 |
The course allows any moodle user to join, but only if they know the 'enrolment key' for the course - a one-time password that controls access. This enrolment key will usually be supplied by your course tutor. |
 |
The course has an enrolment key as described above, but also allow 'Guest Access'. Guests have 'read-only' access. To access a course as a guest, select the "Login as a guest" option. |
|
The course is open for anyone to join. Simply follow the prompts moodle presents you with you will be provided with full access to the course. |
* only if new user course enrolment is still allowed by the tutor.