Archive for category eLearning

If you utilize the upload feature in Moodle 1.9.3 to enroll students into a course then you may have come across an error message which states something similar to “Error enrolling into (course name) as a student.” Although not a serious error it will cause a variety of issues for your Moodle system. After troubleshooting the issue I’ve found that it comes from trying to enroll a student/teacher/admin, etc into a course which has an enrollment length of “unlimited”.

There are a two ways I know of to handle this. First you could set all of your courses in Moodle to have an enrollment period of 365 days or less. This could however pose problems for larger systems with many users. You wouldn’t want to have to re-enroll, and track a large set of users.

The better solution is to make a code change to the upload code on your Moodle system. In the uploaduser.php file in the /admin/ directory of your Moodle installation. Somewhere around lines #660 you’ll want to make these code changes:

if ($courseit->enrolperiod) {
$timestart = time();
$timeend = ($oldtimeend-$timestart) + $courseit->enrolperiod + $timestart;
}

if($timestart == “”){
$timestart = time();
}

if($timeend == “”){
$timeend = (time()+630720000);
}

You can’t have no unenroll time for Moodle uploads, so what this code change will do is set the un-enroll period to be 10 years from the date of upload. Please contact me if you have any questions about the code.

Please remember that if you do choose to upgrade your Moodle release that this change may be overwritten. So I generally note files which I’ve changed code on, and be sure to either copy those over after an upgrade, or make similar changes to the new Moodle release files.