16.4. Enrollment

Learners can enroll themselves in a course during its defined enrollment period.

The course creator and course team members with the Staff and Admin roles can enroll learners in a course. These course team members can also unenroll learners.

Data about course enrollment is available in the LMS, by selecting Instructor to access the instructor dashboard and from Insights. For more information, see Report Learners Not Yet Enrolled.

16.4.1. Registration and Enrollment

Before a learner can enroll in a course, he or she must complete these steps.

  1. Register a user account, which includes supplying a valid email address, on www.edx.org, edge.edx.org, or your implementation of the edX platform. Each platform requires a separate user account.
  2. Activate the registered account by following the emailed instructions.

As long as the course enrollment end date has not passed, learners who have registered and activated user accounts can enroll themselves in www.edx.org courses, or can enroll in other courses if they know the URL.

Course creators, Admins, and Staff, however, can enroll learners in a course either before or after the learners register their user accounts.

Important

Course team members are not automatically enrolled in courses, although they can access content in Studio, the LMS, and Insights. To work on a course, every course team member must register, activate a user account, and enroll in the course.

16.4.2. Options for Enrolling Learners in a Course

You enroll learners, and other course team members, in your course by supplying their email addresses. After the enrollment end date for a course learners can no longer enroll themselves. However, you can still explicitly enroll learners.

Note

When you enroll learners in a course, all learners are automatically enrolled in the audit enrollment track. For more information about course enrollment tracks, see enrollment track.

When you enroll people in a course, you have the following options.

  • Auto Enroll. When you choose this option, the people who you enroll do not need to complete an explicit course enrollment step. Of the list of email addresses that you supply, those that correspond to a registered user account are immediately enrolled in the course, and your course displays on the Current Courses dashboard for those users on log in. Email addresses on the list that do not match a registered user account are enrolled as soon as that account is registered and activated.

    You can track the enrollment status of the learners who you auto enroll. For more information, see Report Learners Not Yet Enrolled.

    If you do not select Auto Enroll, the people who you enroll must also actively locate your course and enroll themselves in it. These learners see the course on their dashboards after they have done so.

  • Notify learners by email. When you choose this option, an email message is automatically sent to each of the email addresses that you supply. The message includes the name of the course and, for learners who are not already enrolled, a reminder to use that same email address to enroll.

16.4.3. Enroll Learners in a Course

To enroll learners or course team members, follow these steps.

  1. View the live version of your course.

  2. Select Instructor, and then select Membership.

  3. In the Batch Enrollment section of the page, enter the username or email address of the learner, or enter multiple names or addresses separated by commas or new lines.

    You can copy and paste data from a CSV file of email addresses. However, note that this feature is better suited to courses with smaller enrollments, rather than courses with massive enrollments.

  4. For Role of the users being enrolled, select the role of the learner.

    • If the learner is a member of the course staff, select Partner.
    • If the learner is not a member of the course staff, select Learner.

    Note

    All of the users that you enroll at one time must have the same role. If you have some users who are partners and others who are learners, you must complete two batch enrollments.

  5. In the Enter the reason why the students are to be manually enrolled or unenrolled field, enter a specific, detailed reason why you want to enroll these learners.

  6. To streamline the course enrollment process, leave Auto Enroll selected.

  7. To send learners an email message, leave Notify students by email selected.

  8. Select Enroll.

You can view or download a list of the people who are enrolled in the course. For more information, see Learner Data.

Note

When you enroll learners in a course, all learners are automatically enrolled in the audit enrollment track. For more information about course enrollment tracks, see enrollment track.

Note

If your course has a fee, and an organization wants to purchase enrollment for multiple seats in your course at one time, you can create enrollment codes for the organization. The organization then distributes these enrollment codes to its learners to simplify the enrollment process. You can also create coupon codes to give learners a discount when they enroll in your course. For more information, see Enable and Create Enrollment Codes.

16.4.3.1. View an Enrollment Count

After you create a course, you can access the total number of people who are enrolled in it. Note the following information about how this count is computed.

  • In addition to learners, the enrollment count includes all course team members, including Admins and Staff. (To work with a course in Studio, the LMS, or Insights, you must be enrolled in that course.)

  • The enrollment count displays the number of currently enrolled learners and course team members. It is not a historical count of everyone who has ever enrolled in the course.

    Note

    Learners can unenroll from courses, and course Admins and Staff can unenroll learners when necessary.

The total number of current enrollees is shown as the sum of the number of people who selected each of the certification tracks (verified, professional, or honor) that is available for your course.

To view the enrollment count for a course, follow these steps.

  1. View the live version of your course.

  2. Select Instructor, and then select Course Info if necessary.

    The Enrollment Information section of the page that opens shows the number of people who are currently enrolled in your course and in each of the certification tracks.

16.4.4. Report Learners Not Yet Enrolled

After you enroll learners in a course using the Auto Enroll option, any learner who does not yet have a user account must register and activate an account to complete the enrollment process. In addition, the learner must register the account using the same email address that was used for auto enrollment. You can download a report of auto enrolled email addresses that do not yet correspond to an enrolled learner.

To download this report, follow these steps.

  1. View the live version of your course.
  2. Select Instructor, and then select Data Download.
  3. In the Reports section of the page, select Download a CSV of learners who can enroll.

A status message indicates that report generation is in progress. This process can take some time to complete, but you can navigate away from this page and do other work while it runs.

To track the progress of the report process, reload the page in your browser and scroll down to the Pending Tasks section.

  1. To open or save the report, select the {org}_{course_id}_may_enroll_info_{date}.csv file name at the bottom of the page.

16.4.5. Unenroll Learners from a Course

You can remove learners from a course by unenrolling them. To prevent learners from re-enrolling, course enrollment must also be closed. You use Studio to set the Enrollment End Date for the course to a date in the past. For more information, see Scheduling a Course Run.

Note

Unenrollment does not delete data for a learner. An unenrolled learner’s state remains in the database and is reinstated if the learner does re-enroll.

To unenroll learners, you supply the email addresses of enrolled learners.

  1. View the live version of your course.

  2. Select Membership.

  3. In the Batch Enrollment section of the page, enter a username or an email address, or multiple names or addresses separated by commas or new lines.

  4. In the Enter the reason why the students are to be manually enrolled or unenrolled field, enter a specific, detailed reason why you want to unenroll these learners.

  5. To send learners an email message, leave Notify students by email selected.

    Note

    The Auto Enroll option has no effect when you select Unenroll.

  6. Select Unenroll. The course is no longer listed on the learners’ Current Courses dashboards, and the learners can no longer access the course content or contribute to discussions or the wiki.