Managing Cohorts in Moodle

Types of Cohort

Automatic Cohorts

Cohorts are automatically imported from central university data, which comes indirectly from SITS.

Each cohort is automatically created, and new students are automatically added to them. No manual intervention should be required here - please contact IT Support if you see any problems, or if the list of courses to import should change.

However, students are never automatically removed from a cohort. This is primarily for safety, to ensure they aren't accidentally unregistered from classes if a mistake is made, and so no historical data is lost when students leave/transfer at the end of the year. See below for instructions on removing students from a cohort.

Manual Cohorts

However, this doesn't work for all courses. Due to the way data is entered into SITS, or perhaps imported into Oak LDAP, the 1-year MSc cohorts end up with two years worth of students during Aug/Sep. For this reason, we use cohorts that are created and managed manually for those courses.

Accessing Cohorts

Go to the Courses site and make sure you are logged in - click "Log in with SSO" in the top right corner if not.

Go to Site administration > Users > Accounts > Cohorts to see the list of cohorts.

Things to note here:

Manual cohorts should always have *MANUAL* at the start of the name, and MANUAL_ at the start of the Cohort ID, to clearly differentiate them from the automatic cohorts.
The "College Tutors" cohort is automatically generated and managed by the IT Support team.
Historically, two cohorts were created in specific categories, rather than system-wide, so only show on the "All cohorts" tab. This is not recommended going forward.

To see/edit the students in each cohort, click the Settings icon () then "Assign".

Creating a Manual Cohort

From the "System cohorts" screen, click "Add new cohort". Enter the following:

Name: *MANUAL* Course Name [Year] - using the same format as the automatic cohorts, but with *MANUAL* at the beginning.
Cohort ID: MANUAL_CourseCode_Year - using the same format as the automatic cohorts, but with MANUAL_ at the beginning.

Leave other fields as their default values and click "Save changes".

Adding Students to a Cohort

Click the Settings icon () next to the cohort, then click "Assign".

Use the search box on the right to search for the student by name or email address.

Select them and click "Add".

Removing Students from a Cohort

IMPORTANT WARNING
If "Cohort Sync" is in use for this cohort, removing a student from the cohort will also unenrol them from the relevant courses, unregister them from any classes, unsubscribe them from announcements, hide their assignment submissions, and potentially lose other data such as custom notification settings. You should only do this if you are sure that is not the case - e.g. at the very start of the year. Please contact IT Support if in doubt.

Click the Settings icon () next to the cohort, then click "Assign".

Find the student in the left hand list. If there are too many, use the search box on the left to search for the student by name or email address.

Select them and click "Remove".