Group Auto-enrol Plugin

Group Auto-enrol takes a repetitive job off teachers' hands: putting new participants into course groups. The moment someone is enrolled in a course, the plugin adds them to one of that course's groups. Because it responds to Moodle™'s own enrolment event instead of relying on one specific enrolment method, it works the same way for manual enrolment, self-enrolment with an enrolment key, cohort sync and any other method that enrols users.

Teachers turn it on per course, from the course's Participants page under "Auto-enrol in groups". They choose whether new participants can go into any of the course's groups or only into a selected set, and the plugin then places each newcomer in one of those groups at random. Participants who already belong to one of the chosen groups are left where they are, and groups that have since been deleted are skipped automatically. If a course has no groups yet, the settings page points the teacher to the groups page first.

The plugin was originally written by Pascal Maury in 2016. Today it is co-maintained by Ldesign Media together with Gemma Lesterhuis of LT&C, and Pascal is still credited as a maintainer in the Moodle™ plugins directory. We have looked after it since 2020, and together with LT&C we have kept it compatible with each new Moodle™ release, most recently Moodle™ 5.0 and 5.1.

Along the way we added a Privacy API provider, refactored the code for Moodle™ 4.2 and 4.5, and enlarged the database field that stores the selected groups so that settings for courses with many groups are saved correctly. For Moodle™ 5.0 and 5.1 we updated the code and brought it in line with the current Moodle™ coding standards, and it now passes Moodle™'s automated code checks in CI. The current release supports Moodle™ 4.5 to 5.1 on PHP 8.1 and higher, while earlier releases remain available for older Moodle™ sites. The plugin stores no personal data of its own: it only keeps each course's settings, and group membership itself is managed by Moodle™.