A Cohort or “site-wide group” is a collection of users that can be enrolled into courses in one action, either manually or automatically. The addition of Cohorts in Moodle 2.0 will ease the administrative burden involved in creating class lists.
According to Moodle.org the goals for Cohorts are:
- Simplify manual enrolments – instead of enrolling students one by one, it would be possible to enrol a cohort with single click.
- Cohort enrolment plugin – new enrolment plugin synchronising users in cohort with enrolments in a course (including role assignment and group membership)
- Synchronisation with external systems – some external systems do not know the actual courses, they only contain some user groups, at present we do not have a simple way to reuse these groups in Moodle.
Additional benefits of the Cohorts feature include the ability to add users to more than one cohort and teachers being able to add single users to a course as well as cohorts. Should the occasion arise the name of a cohort can be changed.
Cohorts are one of the most requested missing features in Moodle and will be considered a very welcome addition to Moodle 2.0.
If you are interested in upgrading to Moodle 2.0 or want more information on what is involved email me at joel.kerr@synergy-learning.com
Tags: Cohorts, Moodle, Moodle 2.0, Synergy Learning