Course student enrollment explained in detail

WP Courseware Enrollment requirements

The first thing to note about enrollment is that in order to have access to any course, a student must be enrolled into the course. In order to enroll a student, the student must be registered on your WordPress site as a subscriber. Once registration and enrollment are complete, the student may login to the WordPress site and navigate to a course outline, and access the course units.

Various methods for WordPress registration

1. Default WordPress registration function
2. Membership Plugin registration function
3. 3^rd party plugin like Theme My Login

WordPress registration - WordPress provides a method to register on a WordPress site. In order to take advantage of registration via WordPress, you must ensure that the “Anyone can register” is selected under “General Settings”. Also ensure that the “New User Defualt Role” is set to “Subscriber”. Once this option is configured, you simply need to go to http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-login.php?action=register and register for your WordPress account.

Membership registration - Membership plugins such as WishList Member or MemberPress allow you to protect and sell content on your WordPress website. One great feature of a membership plugin is that most of them have really good user management functions. Also they provide custom registration pages. Most membership plugins utilize the default WordPress user database to add new members. With this in mind, each membership level or product typically has a special registration page which can define which membership level will be assigned to the individual signing up.

Theme My Login - Theme My Login is a free plugin that allows you to create nice looking registration & login forms. When a user registers via Theme My Login, it is virtually the same as registering via default WordPress registration process but looks much nicer.

WP Courseware can work well with each one of the scenarios above, however you will need to know exactly how WP Courseware behaves with regard to each scenario.

WordPress registration - Courses have the ability to be configured with automatic or manual enrollment.

Manual Enrollment - Manual enrollment requires you to manually go into the classroom page for the course that you'd like to enroll students into. Simply click on WP Courseware→Courses and hover over a course and click Classroom. Then click the Enroll Users button at the top. If you need to add a new user and enroll them manually into courses, you'll need to navigate to the WP Courseware→Students page and click the Add New button at the top. Fill in the new user form and select the courses you'd like the student to be enrolled into and then click Add New User.

Automatic Enrollment – Each course has the ability to be set to automatic enrollment. Basically this means that every course set to automatic enrollment will automatically enroll students up WordPress registration. One thing to note with automatic enrollment is that each student that registers will be enrolled into all courses that are configured for automatic enrollment.

Bulk Enrollment – You can also bulk enroll students. To do so, click WP Courseware→Import/Export, then click the Import Users link at the top. Toward the bottom of the page you will see a link that reads example CSV file here, click on it, to download a sample user import CSV file. Once you populate the CSV file with your students information and courses to enroll into, simply click Choose File (Mac) or Browse (Windows), find your file and insert it. Then click Import Users.

Membership plugin registration - Most membership plugins are hooked to the “user_register” WordPress action hook which fires off when someone registers. If the membership plugin does not hook into this action then automatic enrollment will not work. Once a user registers for any membership level, they will automatically be enrolled into all courses configured for automatic enrollment.

Membership plugin integration – We have developed integration for several membership plugins which makes user enrollment very easy and provides the most control over course access. Basically this method allows you to have automatic enrollment to a specific course upon registration. The process is as follows:

1. Create your course(s)
2. Create membership level(s)
3. Assign course(s) to membership level(s)

When a student registers for a membership level, they will automatically be enrolled into the associated courses.

You can download any one of our integrations  here. We will attempt to continue to add more membership integrations in the future.