[JDA-6] Manage access to your course

Enrolling to an event

Perhaps you want to offer the course material to anyone interested. In this case you just put your material to the website and make it publicly available. This is the default.

Only if you want to know your students personally, you will ask them to register for the course. From our experience, it is not a good idea to offer a self-registration form on the website. The website will receive many registration attempts by malicious software robots who want to enter the site to check for security vulnerabilities or who distribute spam.

My suggestion is to put an email link to the event announcement, so that interested people can send an email to you and you register them.

Overview of Joomla user management

Let's consider a scenario where you have invited a group of students and want to offer an online course to them, and to them only. You have created course material on a couple of web pages. As you know, in Joomla web pages are called 'Articles' which are organized in 'Categories'. Access to all articles of a category is controlled by an 'Access Level'. Articles are visible only to those users who belong to a user group which is granted the correct access level.

Workflow demo: Make your course available to a group of registered students

To summarize the workflow, here are the main steps:

1. Create a category for your course and assign this to all course articles.
2. Create an 'Access Level' named after your course. In your category settings, restrict access to that access level.
3. Create a website user group named after your course. The user group should be a child group of the group 'Registered'. Associate this group with your access level.
4. Register your students as 'users' on the website and as members of your user group.