The content of this article is effective as of July 27, 2021.
UPDATE: As of April 21, 2023, instructors are also part of this auto-enrolment process, as long as they have been assigned in Banner.
One way of enrolling your students into your Moodle course is using the BANNER auto-enrolment method. With this method, any student registered in your course in the BANNER system will be enrolled into the corresponding Moodle shell, as an External Database Enrolment. If you are using this method of enrolment, please do NOT manually enroll any of your students.
When a student is officially dropped from a course for any reason, their Moodle course enrolment will soon display an orange Suspended label, as shown below (often within 105 minutes). When a student's enrolment is Suspended, the student can no longer access the course or receive notifications from course forums. (Note: One reason a student might be dropped is due to non-payment of tuition or fees. This should be dealt with through the Registrar's Office.)
It's up to the instructor to decide whether or not to delete the student's enrolment using the trashcan icon to the far right of the enrolment. Because the student has no access to the course, it can be left as it is. However, it can also be deleted to tidy things up.
Example:
In the short list of enrolments below, the instructor ("Teacher") is Cassandra while Joshua, Paula, and Petar are students.
Joshua and Paula are both still ACTIVE students in the course, indicated by the green label. Their enrolments cannot be removed as long as they are still registered for this course in BANNER.
Cassandra, the instructor, is also ACTIVE but was manually enrolled, so the enrolment has more options available.
Petar was enrolled using the External Database method, but for some reason Petar was dropped from the course in BANNER and therefore his Moodle enrolment has been suspended. Petar can no longer access the course and will not receive any forum notifications. Cassandra can decide if she wants to leave Petar's enrolment there or delete it using the trash icon.
Questions & Answers:
Q: What happens when the course is over? Will my students all be suspended?
A: No, as long as the BANNER ID has not been changed, enrolments will remain Active.
Q: My program uses Meta Course Linking to enrol students in one more course shells. How will this affect my students' enrolments?
A: If a student is dropped from the original "child" CRN, his/her enrolment in that shell will be suspended and his/her enrolment in the meta courses will no longer be visible.
Q: Can I still reuse an existing course by resetting it?
A: Yes, you can, but you need to first replace the BANNER ID field with any other text. This can be anything at all, (for example, 'abc'). Then, you'll have to wait until your students status changes from Active to Suspended. This can take up to an hour. Once all of the student enrolments have changed, you can run the reset steps as usual.
Q: With the auto enroll banner option will instructors have the ability to remove students manually?
A: Yes, but only the Suspended ones. If a student enrolment shows as Active, then the student cannot be removed until they have been dropped from the Banner registration.
Q: Why is it 105 minutes?
A: A list of Banner ADDS and DROPS is produced every hour, on the hour (0:00) and that is synced with Moodle at 45 minutes past the hour (0:45). So, if a student's add or drop is added to a course in Banner before 0:00, this will be reflected in Moodle at 0:45 of the next hour. If the change is entered AFTER 0:00, it will be reflected in Moodle at 0:45 of the next hour. So, the longest period of waiting is 105 minutes.
Q: When does the auto-enrolment stop?
A: It doesn't. The previous window (e.g. 10 days before to 10 days after a course start date) is no longer a factor. All changes in Banner are sent to Moodle on a regular basis.
Q: Do I still need to use manual enrolment or self-enrolment?
A: If you are using Banner auto-enrol correctly, then under ordinary circumstances, there should be no need to use another enrolment method for students. If a student is not showing up in your Participant's list, then it should be investigated with the Registrar's Office.
Q: CAN I still manually enrol a student?
A: Please don't. Manually enrolling students should not be necessary if you are using the Banner auto-enrol, unless there are unusual circumstances. If you absolutely MUST get a student into a course immediately and cannot wait for the system to process his/her Banner registration, you can manually add them temporarily, but please remove them once the registration has been added to Moodle.
Q: Some of my students are showing as "Not current," instead of Suspended. Why is that?
A: That means that the External database enrolment method has been disabled. While the withdrawn or dropped students will still show as Suspended, the students who should be Active (still registered in Banner) show up as "Not current." Re-enabling the method by clicking on the "eye-con" under the Edit column on the Enrolment methods page, will fix things up the way they should be.
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