General information
In Moodle you can use site-wide groups of users called cohorts. When a cohort is added to a course its all members are added too. When you add a cohort registration to a course you can choose in which role users are enrolled to the course e.g. as students.
Once you have added a cohort to all courses you want you can manage it's members through cohort interface. This makes it easier to enrol/unenrol participants to/from multiple courses at the same time.
Without local_cohort_synchronizer -plugin you need to add and remove users from cohorts manually. With the plugin you can specify that if a user has certain information in his/her user profile, he/she is added automatically to the cohort.
Cohort synchronizer -plugin reads information from the user profile fields, more specifically search terms that you define. Users matching these search terms will be automatically added to the cohort when
- They log in to the system
- When their profile information is modified
- By scheduled task that is by default run once a night.
If you have a need to save user email domain -information to a user profile field this information can only be synchronized when
- User logs in to the system
- When their profile information is modified
There is no nightly task for this at the moment (23.12.2020)
Recommended configuration order:
1. Create empty cohorts to the system, this needs to be done manually: Site administration -> Users -> Accounts -> Cohorts -> Add new cohort
2. Open cohort synchronizer settings Site administration -> Users -> Accounts -> Cohort synchronizer
3. Define field settings (from which user fields and what search terms are searched). You need to wait one night before you can continue to step 3 because search terms are updated once a night by scheduled task.
4. Define cohort settings (which search terms should add users to a which cohort)
5. Define how often scheduled task is run (this can only be done by administrators of the system)