Who may enrol, and how

Every course is one of two things: open to anyone, or by invitation. It is in the course settings, under Enrollment.

Anyone

An Enroll button appears on the course page and people join themselves. If the course has a price, they pay on the way in.

This is right for a public catalogue — anybody who finds the course can take it.

By invitation

No Enroll button. People get on the course because somebody put them there, or because they used an invitation link.

This is right for a course run for a particular group, a cohort going through together, or anything an organisation has bought places on.

The case where this matters most

If you are selling places in advance — an organisation buys fifty seats for their staff — the course must be by invitation. Left open, anybody can simply enrol for free, and the places you sold are worth nothing.

Grapevine checks this for you at the point you create an invitation: if any course covered by it is open to anyone, you are told and offered the chance to close it there and then. Take the offer. It is the single most expensive setting to get wrong on this screen.

Limiting places

Separately from the policy, a course can cap how many people may be on it. Leave it at zero for no limit.

When the cap is reached, the course page says Course full rather than hiding the Enroll button, so somebody who was told to join knows what has happened rather than thinking the link is broken.

Note the cap counts everybody on the course, staff included.

Dates

A course can have an availability window. Outside it the course page is readable but cannot be joined, and the Dates line says when it opens. Leave both empty for a course that is always available.

These dates are about enrolment. If you want the course’s content to arrive in stages, that is a different setting — see Releasing modules on a schedule.