Enrolling Users into Courses – Docebo Help & Support

Introduction

In your platform, there are different ways to enroll users into E-Learning and ILT / VILT (Instructor-Led Training and Virtual Instructor-Led Training) courses. This article outlines the available options. Users can be enrolled in a course as soon as it's created, but we suggest enrolling them once you've completely configured the course and added all of the training materials.

Enrolling Users into E-Learning Courses

To enroll users in one E-Learning course, access the Course Management page in your platform, then find the course in the list of courses. Either click on the course description and move to the Enrollments tab or click on the users’ icon to directly access the tab. Click on Manage Enrollments in the top right corner and select Enroll Users.

In order to enroll users into multiple E-Learning courses, select the courses by using the checkbox in the course row. Once you have selected at least two courses in the table, the Choose Action button will be made available at the bottom of the Course Management table. Select the Enroll Users option. In the right panel that will open, select the users to enroll by flagging the checkbox next to their name. You can also flag entire groups or branches using the corresponding tabs.

Please note that when enrolling users in a branch into courses, if the branch has descendant branches, users assigned to the descendant branches will not be enrolled in the course unless you also select those descendent branches. Only users belonging to the parent branch will be enrolled. Also note that, in order to prevent the enrollment of huge numbers of users in courses, you cannot select the root branch. If you need to enroll all of the platform users in the selected courses, use the Select All feature in the Users tab.

Once you've selected the users, press Next.

Select the level that users will have in the course: Learners, Tutors, or Instructors.

Finally, decide whether to set an enrollment deadline for the users being enrolled. If you set a validity period for the enrollment (using the Active From and Active To selectors), the user will have visibility on the course only during the selected period. After the deadline, users will still view the course tile in their platforms, but they will no longer be able to access it and a lock icon will be shown in the course card. If no enrollment timeline is necessary, leaving this option blank will default to no timeline set and continued access to the users.

Please note that:

the start date of the enrollment deadline is counted from 00:00:00 UTC of the selected start date. If, for example, your timezone is UTC +04:00, then the enrollment deadline starts at 04:00:00 of the selected start date
the end date of the enrollment deadline is counted up to 23:59:59 UTC of the selected end date. If, for example, your timezone is UTC +04:00, then the enrollment deadline ends at 03:59:59 of the day after the selected end date

Press Next to select the notifications to send to the user upon their enrollment. This area lists all the Digest: User enrolled into a Course notifications in the platform. Finally, press Confirm to finalize the enrollments.

Please note that notifications will not be enabled if the option Send immediate notification digest on massive enrollment action is not selected in the Advanced Settings. Please refer to the Security Related chapter of the article Managing the Platform Advanced Settings.

A background job will be started if the maximum number of enrollments exceeds 20. Remember that one enrollment is a combination of a single user and a single course, so selecting 3 courses and 2 users makes 6 enrollments.

Enrolling Users into ILT/VILT Courses

To enroll users in one ILT/VILT course, access the Course Management page in your platform, then find the course in the list of courses. Either click on the course description and move to the Enrollments tab or click on the users’ icon to directly access the tab. Click on Manage Enrollments in the top right corner and select Enroll Users.

In order to enroll users into multiple ILT/VILT courses, select the courses by using the checkbox in the course row. Once you have selected at least two courses in the table, the Choose Action button will be made available at the bottom of the Course Management table. Select the Enroll Users option. In the right panel that will open, select the users to enroll by flagging the checkbox next to their name. You can also flag entire groups or branches using the corresponding tabs.

Once you've selected the users, press Next.

Select whether to enroll users in the course or in one of the available sessions. When users are enrolled in an ILT or VILT course without selecting a session, they will have to select a session by themselves upon entering the course main page.

In order to enroll a user into multiple sessions of an ILT/VILT course, after enrolling them into the course, move to the Enrollments tab and click on the ellipsis icon at the end of the user’s row, then select Enroll into Sessions. Select the desired sessions by flagging the checkboxes, then click on Enroll. You can do the same for more users at the same time, just by flagging the checkboxes next to their usernames in the Enrollments tab and then clicking on Choose Action.

Only Superadmins and Power Users can enroll a user into multiple sessions of the same course. Users can only self enroll into a single session in a course. When a learner is enrolled into multiple sessions of the same course, completing any session of the course will update the learner's enrollment status to 'Completed'.

Select the level that users will have in the course: Learners or Tutors. Remember that the level you select is always set on the course enrollment and will apply to all of the sessions of the course in which the user will be enrolled. Once you set the user enrollment level in an ILT or VILT course, you cannot change it. If you need to do so, delete the user enrollment and create a new one with the updated level.

Please note that notifications will not be enabled if the option Send immediate notification digest on massive enrollment action is not selected in the Advanced Settings. Please refer to the Security Related chapter of the article Managing the Platform Advanced Settings.

Enrollment Levels of Users in Courses

If you're needing to understand which course level to place your users (either as learners, instructors or tutors), refer to the Enrollment Level Comparison Table for details of each permission for each user level.

Managing a Course's Enrollments Page

Once you’ve enrolled users into a course, the enrolled users are listed in the course’s Enrollments tab. You can customize the table layout by selecting the columns you want to see in the list by clicking on the columns management icon in the top left corner of the table. The table layout is refreshed in real time when columns are selected or unselected from this area.

From this page, you can perform several actions, both for individual users or for several users at a time. When working at user level, click on the ellipsis icon at the end of the user row to access the following actions:

Access the User Stats in the course (only for E-Learning courses). When this option is selected, you will be redirected to the Reports tab of the course, showing the Course Summary Report already filtered for the selected user.
Edit Enrollment: edit the user enrollment by changing the enrollment status (ex. from in progress to completed) and managing the enrollment additional fields. For E-Learning courses, here you can also change the user level in the course (ex. from learner to instructor) and enable an enrollment deadline.
Enroll into Sessions (only for ILT/VILT courses): in the slideout panel, flag the checkboxes next to the session you want to enroll the user into, then press Enroll. For more information, refer to the chapter Managing Enrollments and Evaluations for Sessions of the article Creating and Managing ILT and VILT Sessions.
Use the Reset Date Range for Access action (only for E-Learning courses) to delete the visibility period validity and make the course always visible and accessible for the selected user.
Change Status: Quickly change the user status (ex. from in progress to completed). Please note that some statuses may be disabled, depending on the user's current status. The change user status functionality is also used to enroll users in the course from the waiting list.
Send email: use this option to send an email to the user. When sending an email to users from this area, a slideout panel will open for you to compose your message. Besides the recipient email and the body of the message, you can use the following shortcodes: [username] = username of the user; [first_name] = first name of the user (if set); [last_name] = last name of the user (if set); [email] = email name of the user (if set); [course_code] = code of the course (if set); [course_name] = title of the course; [course_description] = description of the course; [course_link] = link to land directly in the course when clicked.
Unenroll the user from the course. When this option is disabled, it means that the user has been enrolled in the course as a consequence of being enrolled in a learning plan containing this course. In this case, the user cannot be unenrolled from the course, because this would break the learning plan’s logical integrity: you have to unenroll the user from the learning plan first to make course unenrollment action available. Please note that when users unenroll or are unenrolled from a course, their tracking is kept in the platform, so that if they re-enroll or are re-enrolled in the course, they can resume it from where they left off.

From the enrollment page, you can perform the same action for multiple users. Select them by flagging the checkbox next to their usernames and click on Choose Action at the bottom right corner of the enrollments table to quickly edit enrollments, change the users’ status in the course, unenroll users from the course, reset the date range for access (for E-Learning courses), enroll users into sessions (for ILT/VILT courses), or send an email. When sending an email to multiple recipients from this page, remember that it will be sent to the selected users, independently from their status. If you have selected inactive users, the email will be sent to them as well.

When sending an email to users from this area, a slideout panel will open for you to compose your message. Besides the recipient email and the body of the message, you can use the following shortcodes: [username] = username of the user; [first_name] = first name of the user (if set); [last_name] = last name of the user (if set); [email] = email name of the user (if set); [course_code] = code of the course (if set); [course_name] = title of the course; [course_description] = description of the course; [course_link] = link to land directly in the course when clicked.

The Choose Action menu may also show a link to an external website. Click on this option, to open the website in a pop-up window where you will be able to operate, for example, to mark in a third-party system that the user has completed the course. Links to external websites must be created as enrollment IFRAME additional fields. Refer to the Adding Enrollment Additional Field chapter of this article for further information on how to create and manage enrollment additional fields.

Importing Enrollments from Another Course

You can also import enrollments from one course to another. To do so, click on Manage Enrollments in the top right corner and select Import enrolled users from course.

In the right panel, select the course from which you would like to import enrollments or search for it by typing its name in the Search Courses area. Then choose whether to import all users, independently of their level and status, or to select one or more levels and statuses to import. If needed, set the enrollment validity period using the Active From and Active Until dates. The enrollment validity period of the source course is always overridden. If no enrollment validity period is set during the import, there will be no enrollment validity period for the imported enrollments. Click on Next, review your selection, and confirm it by clicking Submit.

Enrolling Users to Courses or Sessions via CSV

You can also enroll users into courses or ILT and VILT sessions of courses via CSV. You can do so from the main Course Management page if you want to enroll users into multiple courses, or from the Enrollment tab in a specific course or session of a course. Once you access the import panel in your platform, the process for the CSV upload and data mapping is the same. To start this process for:

Multiple courses, access the main Course Management page, click on Manage Enrollments in the top right corner and select Manage Enrollment via CSV
For a single course, find the course in the list on the Course Management page, click on its description to access the course area and click on Manage Enrollments in the top right corner and select Manage Enrollment via CSV

Once you’ve completed one of these actions, a slideout Manage Enrollments from CSV panel will open on the right side of the platform. For a successful upload, it is important to create a properly formatted.CSV file. Download the sample CSV file for an example of file formatting. Please note that dates are formatted as yyyy-mm-dd, but your spreadsheet may display them differently, depending on the program you used to open the CSV sample.

When ready, you can either drag and drop it into the upload section of the slideout panel or click the upload area to find the file. Remember that the example file always includes all of the available fields. Depending on your use case, not all the columns may be needed. Please note that the maximum file size for CSV files is 3MB.

Once the file is uploaded, press the Advanced Settings title to configure additional options. The system is configured to automatically detect the Field Separator needed in order to organize the information by columns. Information can be divided by a comma, a semicolon, or manually, depending on your needs.

Flag the option to consider the first row as a header, if this fits your CSV file format, and select the File Charset from the dropdown menu. We recommend the UTF-8 charset, which is standard. Please remember to use quotation marks to delimit the text content. Press Confirm to upload your.CSV file.

The system will then process your CSV file. Once ready, you will be redirected to the Import page. In the Profiles section, you can select a preset profile from the dropdown menu to associate a previous mapping configuration to this CSV import. Press the Overwrite Current Preset button if you want to save changes to the current preset. Additionally, you can manually map the columns to platform fields (see more hereafter), then save the configuration by pressing the Save this Preset as New button. In the pop-up box, provide a name for the preset, then press Save.

The Preview section will display a preview of the CSV file as read by the system; only a few lines of the file will be displayed to serve as guidance. Drag and drop the fields in the Docebo Fields section on the left to match the fields with the column names of your CSV file. You can import the following fields via CSV for enrollments: Username, Course ID, Session ID, Active From date, Active Until date, Level, and any additional fields for courses or enrollments.

Once you’ve matched the fields for all of your columns, review all of the info on the import page, then press the Import button at the bottom of the page. Confirm the information in the pop-up message that will be displayed, then press Enroll Users.

If a course or session has an enrollment limit, the import will respect this limit, and only the first users in the CSV file will be imported until the maximum enrollment capacity is met. Once the limit is met, if the course or session has a waiting list enabled, any additional users will be placed on the waiting list.

The import job happens in the background. In case of any errors, an error file will be made available for download. To find this file, access the Admin Menu, then select the Background Jobs item. Find the job in the list to download the file.

All users that were enrolled in the course(s) will appear in the list of users on the course or session’s Enrollments tab, where you can edit each user’s enrollment as necessary.

The procedure to enroll users via CSV is not intended to manage the status of enrollments too. For this reason, when you enroll users via CSV file, the user course enrollment status is always reset to enrolled.

Adding Instructors to Courses

Instructors are an important part of courses, whether they are e-learning, ILT or VILT courses, so we suggest you, as the Superadmin, add at least one instructor for each course, also to reduce your manual workload. Instructors can be assigned to courses in different ways, also depending on the type of course.

As for e-learning courses, manually enrolling one or multiple users into the course, set the user(s) level to Instructor in the slideout panel. As an option, reach the course’s Enrollments tab, find the user that you would like to appoint as an instructor and press the ellipsis menu in the user row, then select Edit Enrollment. In the Level dropdown, select Instructor, then press Confirm to complete the action.

When enrolling users into courses via CSV file, create a Level column, then ensure that every user that should be an instructor has the Instructor level in their row in the Level column.

Instructors of e-learning courses are counted as enrolled users.

When assigning instructors to ILT courses, instructors are assigned to the event or session without being enrolled in it. In addition, you can assign instructors either to a session or to an event:

Session Instructor. If you assign an instructor to a session, they will be automatically assigned to all of the events included in the session and will be able to mark the attendance for all users attending it. If the Session Completion option is set to Evaluation Based the instructor can set whether the participants have passed them or not. The instructor will be able to create and update the training material for the course. In order to assign one or more instructors to a session, when creating or editing a session, use the Session Instructors field.
Event Instructor. If you assign an instructor to a single event within a session, they can mark the attendance for the learners attending that specific event and will have no control over the other events nor over the session. Event instructors cannot upload nor manage the training material assigned to the course. In order to assign one or more instructors to an event, when creating or editing an event, move to the Details tab and then to the Event Instructors area.

Assigning Sessions’ Instructor via CSV

To assign instructors to sessions via CSV, while in the Course Management page, identify the ILT course for which you want to assign sessions instructors via CSV, click on its description and, once in the course area, move to the Sessions tab. From here, click on the plus button and select the Assign Session Instructors via CSV option.

In the Import ILT Instructors panel, drag and drop your CSV file into the upload section, or press the Browse button to find it on your device. Find out more on the accepted values for the instructor data fields.

For a successful upload, it is important to create a CSV file properly formatted. In order to view a correct example, select Download a Sample CSV File item in the slideout panel. The maximum file size of a CSV file that you’re able to import into your platform for a user upload is 3MB.

After selecting the file, click on the Advanced Settings section to view and configure the additional settings. The system is configured to automatically detect the Field Separator, which is needed in order to organize the information by columns. Information can be additionally organized by a comma, a semicolon, or manually, depending on your needs.

Flag the option that the first row is considered a Header only if this fits your CSV file format, and select the File Charset from the dropdown menu. As for the File Charset, we recommend UTF-8, which is standard. Please remember to use quotation marks to delimit the text content. Press Confirm to upload your CSV file.

The system will then process your CSV file. Once ready, you will be redirected to the page used to map the fields included in your CSV file with the Docebo available fields.

The Preview section will display a preview of the CSV file as read by the system. Drag and drop the fields in the Docebo Fields section on the left to match the fields with the column names of your CSV file.

Once you’ve matched the fields for all of your columns, review all of the info on the import page. Before proceeding, you can save the fields you have mapped as a preset, so that the same mapping will be used for your future CSV imports. To do so, in the Preset area of the left panel, click on Save this Preset as New. In the pop-up box, provide a name for the preset, then press Save. Once created, a preset cannot be deleted, but you can overwrite it by clicking on the Overwrite Current Preset.

When ready, click on the Import button at the bottom of the page. The Import button is enabled only when the mandatory fields (Session ID and Instructor ID) are mapped. Read the information in the pop-up message that will be displayed, then press Import ILT Instructors.

Remember that Power Users are allowed to assign instructors only for the courses they are assigned to.

Adding Enrollment Additional Fields

Enrollment additional fields are additional fields prompted at enrollment time (e.g. the enrollment reason) that either users fill out upon self-enrolling in courses from catalogs, or Superadmins and Power Users (with granted permissions) complete when enrolling users. Depending on their configuration, enrollment additional fields may be mandatory.

To create enrollment additional fields, access the Course Management page, then move to the Enrollment Additional Fields tab. Select the type of enrollment additional field you want to create from the Add dropdown menu, then press the Create button. In the pop-up box, select the language of the field name, that is how the additional field will be presented to users, then type the field name into the corresponding text box. Flag whether the enrollment field is requested for all courses, or only for a specific category of courses. If you flagged the option to apply the field to a category of courses, select the category using the dropdown menu.

Next, flag whether the field is mandatory and visible to users. If it's mandatory, the user or the Superadmin/Power User must fill in the enrollment additional field upon enrolling in the course. If the field is mandatory but not visible to users, you as the Superadmin (or Power User with granted permissions) will have to fill in the additional fields when enrolling users into the courses since they will not be able to do it by themselves. Even in this situation, users will be able to freely self-enroll into courses. Please note that when users self-enroll in courses using either subscription codes or enrollment links, they will not be required to fill in the mandatory additional fields.

When creating iframe additional fields, remember that they are used to open external websites on the course enrollment page, not during the enrollment procedure. Press Save Changes to complete the creation procedure.

Dropdown enrollment additional fields will require the internal ID of the value you insert in the element list, not the value itself. The ID can be fetched via API. Further information about Docebo API.

The new field will then be listed in the Enrollment Additional Fields tab. You can edit the field by pressing the pen and paper icon or delete the field by pressing the X icon in the field's row.

Once the enrollment additional field is created, depending on its configuration, users will be prompted to fill it out upon enrolling in courses from catalogs and/or Superadmins (or Power Users with enrollment permissions for courses) will be prompted to fill it out while enrolling users into courses to which the field is applied. Please note that enrollment additional fields are not prompted when users enroll or are enrolled in courses from learning plans, or when users are automatically enrolled in courses according to the rules defined via the Enrollment Rules app.

You can create up to 50 enrollment additional fields in your platform.

Creating an Iframe Additional Field

To create an Iframe additional field, select the Iframe option from the Field Type dropdown menu when creating a new additional field. Then, enter the field name, Iframe URL, Iframe height, salt secret, and Oauth2 client.

The URL and Iframe height are the only mandatory fields, but it’s suggested to enter all of the fields to ensure proper configuration. Press Confirm to continue.

Some sources of external content may have security mechanisms in place. If this is the case, you may be required to utilize an OAuth client that you have set up in a previous step. Fill in the Salt Secret for the iFrame and select the OAuth Client from the dropdown menu, if necessary. By providing the salt secret, you are adding a checksum to the data, ensuring that the credentials for this access are maintained securely. If you do not add the salt secret, the iframe content will be launched from your platform without any additional parameters that may be required by the provider of the content. More information on salt secrets.

Please note that the Iframe additional field cannot be set as a mandatory field.

Enrollment and Waiting Lists

Once users are enrolled in a course, or in a session, they may end up in the related waiting list. Learn more on waiting lists.

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