Course enrolment approval workflows

Course enrolment approval workflows are one type of approval workflow available in Totara 19. Administrators can configure these workflows to allow users to request access to certain courses, and managers or administrators to approve their requests. For example, if you have courses that require payment, you can configure self enrolment to require manager approval before users can enrol on the course, enabling managers to budget more effectively.

Course enrolment approval workflows will use a default approval form plugin called Course enrolment approval form. You can check that this plugin is enabled (and which other form plugins are available) by going to Quick-access menu > Plugins > Approval form plugins > Manage approval form plugins (/mod/approval/form/manage_plugins.php).

Create a course enrolment approval workflow

Before you can create a course enrolment approval workflow, you need to ensure that you have set up an approval workflow type and an approval form, as these are not set up by default. These will both be used when configuring your course enrolment approval workflow.

As a Site Administrator you can create a new course enrolment approval workflow for your site by following these steps:

1. Ensure that the Course enrolment approval form plugin is enabled via Quick-access menu > Plugins > Approval form plugins > Manage approval form plugins (/mod/approval/form/manage_plugins.php).
2. Set up an approval workflow type, labelled so that people know that it's intended for course enrolment. Set up an approval form using the Course enrolment approval form plugin.
3. Go to Quick-access menu > Manage approval workflows (/mod/approval/workflow/index.php).
4. Click New workflow.
5. You will need to give the workflow a name and select the workflow type you created in step 2. Optionally you can also add a description or edit the auto-generated Workflow ID.
6. Click Next.
7. For the Approval form, select the form you configured in step 2 (or another approval form you have configured), then click Create.
8. You can then configure the workflow by adding stages, selecting the approvers for any approver stages, and configuring the notifications for each stage.
9. Once you've finished customising the workflow, click Publish.

When the workflow is published it will be available to select for the Approve enrolments setting in the self enrolment instance.

Set up course enrolment approval workflows for a course

The self enrolment enrolment method allows users to enrol on a course they're interested in, and by configuring a course to allow self enrolment using approval workflows, you can ensure that users can only enrol on courses with their manager's approval.

To set up self enrolment with approval workflows on a course, follow these steps:

1. Ensure that the self enrolment plugin is enabled at the site level, and configure the workflow and approval form you wish to use (if you don't want to use the defaults).
2. Navigate to the course.
3. From Course administration go to Users > Enrolment methods.
4. From the Add method dropdown menu select the option Self enrolment. Alternatively, if Self enrolment is already configured for the course, you can instead click the cog icon () next to Self enrolment.
5. For the Approve enrolments setting, select one of the course enrolment approval workflows you have configured and published (unpublished workflows are not available to select). Complete the other settings as desired. If you're using the Send course welcome message setting (and optionally the Custom welcome message), note that the message will be sent as soon as the user requests to enrol on the course. You may want to amend the message content to reflect that the enrolment request is pending approval.
6. If you were adding the enrolment method, click the Add method button. If you were only configuring the settings, click Save changes.

Course enrolment approval as a Learner

The exact steps will depend on how you have configured the selected workflow. Here we'll look at the Learner experience when a course is using the default course enrolment approval workflow.

1. A Learner may find a course via the course catalogue, or it may be displayed to them in their recommendations.
2. When the Learner selects a course, they will see the available enrolment options, which will depend on how the course's enrolment methods and the approval workflow(s) have been configured.
3. If the Learner has multiple job assignments, the Learner can select the job assignment relating to their request. Note that the user will need at least one job assignment. If an Enrolment key is required, the Learner can provide it here.
4. The Learner clicks Request approval.
5. The Learner must then explain why they want to enrol in the Reason for enrolling in this course field.
6. They can then click Submit to submit their request, or Save as draft if they don't want to submit the request immediately. If the Learner chooses to save their approval request as a draft, they can later return to the course and click Complete request to finalise and submit their request.
7. The user's manager is then notified that they have requested approval, and they can see the application on the applications dashboard. They can then choose to approve or deny the request, and optionally add a comment.
8. Finally the Learner is notified of their manager's decision, and if their manager approved the request they will be enrolled on the course.