Moodle

Robert - I agree that the longtimenosee setting is not being communicated to teachers when they setup their course and tell it to never expire a student. Personally, I think that the default for longtimenosee should be never. When a site administrator sets it to something, the teacher should be informed about it. I like the idea of having an option like 'Never ever' which would mean never even if it is beyond longtimenosee. Should there be a capability that allows a teacher to do that since technically they are overriding a value set by the site administrator? I agree that this is a major issue and sorry that it has not received more attention. In my mind it represents a type of unexpected data loss for the teacher. I would be interested in seeing how folks think it should be resolved. I see the following options:

1) Notify teacher, do nothing - leave the behavior as is and notify teacher that never does not really mean never
2) Give preference to teacher - add an option for the teacher to expire students based on site's longtimenosee variable or never which really is never (possibly adding a capability)\
3) Give preference to administrator - add an option allowing the administrator to choose whether the course expiry length or site's longtimenosee setting has preference and communicate this to the teacher. So admin would set a length of days - say 120 and then check a box to enforce longtimenosee even if course setting is set to never and if so display message to teacher that the admin setting is in place.

Ideally I might go even a step further and say that if the admin changes this setting, that the teachers should receive some type of notification about the change so that they understand why
some of their students are being unenrolled from the course but this would be icing on the cake and worthy of a separate issue in the tracker.

Of the three options, I think #3 is most Moodle-like, giving the site admin the option to control the desired behavior and clearly communicating that information to the teacher.

Peace - Anthony

adding affects version 1.9

Thanks adding 1.9 although as it happens, you removed earlier versions, so 1.9 is the only one showing now.

Thanks also for adding your thoughts, which actually go beyond what I talked about. You are, of course, right that it is totally untransparent what the site setting is. May be it should be shown as part of the interface. He should probably make a separate tracker entry about it.

I complained about something more basic: there is no way to set unlimited enrollment in a course if the longtimenosee is set to anything but unlimited.

In other words, the "unlimited" option on the popup menu for "Enrolment duration" in the course is a big fat lie. It does not mean unlimited but it means "whatever longtimenosee" is set to. This is why I suggested to rename it and add true unlimited as an option.

I have actually implemented that on my Moodle site. it was actually quite simple to do. I haven't looked how that would port from Moodle 1.5 to newer version, though. My popup menu for "Enrolment duration" has now:

site default
unlimited
1 days
2 days
and so on.

To follow what transpired from your post, the first item could be:

site default (180 days)
or
site default (unlimited)

This approach is used for site default settings in the Enrolment Plugins menu and in the Default role menu, so this suggestion fits with de facto standard.

I mean that you should make tracker entry...

With regards to automatic notification about changes to longtimenosee setting, I am not sure whether this should be part of Moodle or left for whatever communication means a site employes for their teachers and administrators.

In terms of controlling whether teachers can set something else that the site default, if I follow your suggestion, it might be as simple as adding a capability that controls whether a teacher, a user actually, can change this or not, in course settings.