Easily enroll multiple students on WordPress into your purchased Moodle course with the Edwiser Bridge-Bulk Purchase extension

Bulk Purchase. Credit: Alexas_Photos.
Source: http://goo.gl/0T7ajs

Welcome to my fifth and last post in a series of five posts featuring the Edwiser Bridge and its four extensions. Today I will focus on the Edwiser Bulk Purchase Extension, which is a commercial plugin. The best thing about this plugin is that you can now let your administrator or manager purchase more than one quantity of a Moodle course in a single transaction. If that's not good enough, the extension allows the Instructor or Manager to enroll himself and others to the purchased course!

Screen 1. The Edwiser Bulk
Purchase Extension icon.

So, in short, this extension allows instructors, parents, managers or corporate trainers to purchase a Moodle course on behalf of others, and then enroll them. This extension will save you effort and time. Please note this extension requires the WooCommerce Integration extension to be installed first.

Section 1. Overview

Screen 2. The Big Picture.
Where the Bulk Purchase Extension fits in the E-Commerce system.

How useful is this extension? VERY! Imagine that you are an Administrator who is given the responsibility of purchasing a Moodle course online. You have ten (10) students to enroll into the course that costs USD100 per person. Which would you prefer? To pay USD100 once for every student that you enroll - which means you have to repeat the online payment and enrollment process TEN times? Or to pay USD100 x 10 = USD1,000 once, and enter all ten students' account data, and then have all TEN students' Moodle account created automatically?

Obviously the latter as it saves you time and effort. With Edwiser's Bulk Purchase Extension, you can make a bulk online payment for a course for multiple students. and have those students login into Moodle and start off the course. With the extension this is an almost painless process and a breeze to use.

Section II. License Key Activation

Once you have downloaded, installed and activated the extension (plugin), a new entry for 'Bulk Purchase' will be created in the Licenses tab of the Edwiser Bridge settings.

Go to Dashboard | Edwiser Bridge | Licenses

You will need to copy and paste the license key into the "Edwiser Multiple Uses Course Purchase' edit box. Then click the "Activate License" button.

Screen 3. The license key for the Bulk Purchase extension.
The screen shows that this extension has already been activated for the website.

Section III. Walkthrough

Below are a series of screenshots that illustrate a process of me buying a WordPress (WooCommerce) product - a flight simulator joystick - that is associated with a Moodle course - "How to use a joystick for air combat maneuvers". I will pretend that my name is Johnny Appleseed, and I am purchasing the product/course for two users. Their names are Kuala Aloha and Rio Carnival. In the process, I will make an online payment (not actually shown) once and will enter both the users' Moodle account details. Edwiser's Bulk Purchase extension will allow me to do this easily and conveniently.

Let's start the process.

I surf to my E-Commerce website and go to the Product page. My website sells flight simulation-related courses. "Quality Joysticks" is in the technical sense, a WooCommerce product, but it is also a course because it is linked to my Moodle course. See my earlier blog post on the "WooCommerce Integration with Edwiser Bridge" to see how to do this.

I click on the "Quality Joysticks" product. I am now brought to the product's individual page.

Screen 4. Adding an item to a shopping cart

At the individual product page, I notice the "Associated Courses" section. The Moodle course named "How to use a joystick for air combat maneuvers" is associated (linked) to the product "Quality Joysticks".

 I will then tick the "Enroll me" checkbox so that I, as the Instructor, can and will also be enrolled into the Moodle course. Next, I will click the "Add to cart" button.

Screen 5. Enrolling myself, the Instructor, and adding the product
(Moodle course) to the Shopping Cart.

At the Cart page, I notice that the Quantity shows "1". I will want to change this to "2".

Screen 6. Changing the quantity.

I edit the "1" to "2" because I have two users to register.

Screen 7. Updating the shopping cart
to register two items on order.

My theme (Wootique) updates the total to RM1.99 including 6% tax. I proceed to checkout by clicking the "Proceed to Checkout" button.

Screen 8. Checking out.

At this screen, I enter my personal and payment details. I can pay by either credit card (via PayPal), or by online Banking via a local payment gateway. I will not show this part of the process as it is for a future blog post on how to integrate a local payment gateway to your WordPress E-Commerce website.

Screen 9.  Entering billing details. The person filling in the details is a certain Johnny Appleseed,
whose job is to pay for and enroll two users into a Moodle course.

I bite the bullet and click "Place Order". I want to buy the Product (course)!

Screen 10. Placing an order.

One more button to click. The green confirmation button.

Screen 11. Making payment.

Since I would not want to spend money unnecessarily for this blog post, I have simulated the resolution of the transaction by logging into my WordPress E-Commerce site, and manually confirming the order.

Screen 12. Confirming the order without actually making payment
from the Admin's backend - to simulate an actual transaction.

A softcopy invoice is created by my 3rd-party PDF Invoice plugin named 'YITH WooCommerce PDF Invoice and Shipping List'.

Screen 13. "Proof" of payment.
An newly-created invoice is shown.

In my G-Mail inbox, I can see that the WordPress E-Commerce site has sent me a notification, confirming the order and the purchase. An earlier E-mail contains a notification from the same site, informing me of my new WordPress account.

Screen 14. An E-mail notification is sent to your E-mail address which
was specified when you created a WordPress account.

Here's what the top (first) E-mail looks like.

Screen 15. Contents of the notification E-mail containing the transaction information
and the link to a course ("How to use a joystick...") associated with the product.

So my order is complete. Good to know! But how do I add my students to the Moodle course? That's where the earlier (the bottom) E-mail is for. Opening it, I see a link to enrol my two users.

Screen 16. Contents of the WordPress notification E-mail:
a link to the "Enroll Students" page.

Assuming that I haven't yet logged out of WordPress, when I click the link, I am transported to the "Enroll Students" page of the E-Commerce WordPress site. I will first have to select the product from a drop-down selection list.

Screen 17. Accessing the Enroll Students page and selecting a product.

If I was not logged in (perhaps I had logged out earlier) and I clicked the "link to add students", this is what will happen on my website. The message "Please Login to view this page." will appear and the user will know that he or she has to first login into WordPress.

Screen 18. What the Instructor (user) will see if he or she was not logged in.

I select "Quality Joysticks". WordPress already knows that the product is linked to the Moodle course because I had earlier synchronised/linked/associated a Moodle course to the Product. For more information, see my earlier blog post on the "WooCommerce Integration with Edwiser Bridge" to know how to do this.

Screen 19. Selecting the product associated with the course.

A fresh "Enroll Students" dialogue screen appears. I proceed to add the first new user's data. I click on the "Add New User" button.

Screen 20. Since the user chose to purchase two joysticks (see Screen 7.),
the Bulk Purchase plugin will allow the user to create two user Moodle accounts.

Please note that if I wanted to, I could upload a Comma-Delimited-Values file containing the users' data. This is very useful if there are many users to enroll into the Moodle course. The enrollment data could be prepared as an Excel spreadsheet and saved as a CSV file, to be later imported by clicking on the "Upload CSV" button.

However, for this blog post, I will keep this process simple and will manually enter the users' data. I then enter the Rio Carnival's first name (Rio), last name (Carnival) and E-mail address. Then to enter the next user's data, I click on the "Add New User" button.

Screen 21.  The first Moodle account data (for a person named Rio Carnival)
has been entered;  the user will now add the second user's account data.

This time I enter Kuala Aloha's account data. The three essentials are first name, last name and E-mail address. This process is simple.

Screen 22.  The second Moodle account data (for a person named Kuala Aloha)
has been entered. The user now clicks the Enroll button to enroll both users into Moodle.

After I have clicked the "Enroll" button, WordPress responds by displaying the status of my work. "Users with the following email ids have been enrolled successfully:". I must have done it right!

Just for fun, I click on the "Learn how to use" menu item to see where it goes.

Screen 23.  Now that both user accounts have been created and the users enrolled into Moodle,
it is now time to access the Moodle site.

Naturally, the link brings me to the Moodle site. Hmm, that looks like a screenshot from Digital Integration's classic 1993 DOS flight simulator, Tornado.

Note the login id of "Johnny Appleseed" - the person who paid for and who created the  two Moodle accounts (Screen 9). The Moodle course, that was purchased, is listed under "Available courses".

Screen 24. The Moodle site in all its glory. 

So where's the course then? Ah, there it is, right below the words "Available courses". It says "How to use a joystick for air combat maneuvers". A joystick gives a more immersive experience than a keyboard. That much I know.

Screen 25. The screen shows the Admin Moodle backend data.

it shows that Johnny Appleseed (me the Instructor), Kuala Aloha and Rio Carnival have been created.

As I had ticked the "Enroll me" checkbox at Screen 5., I am automatically enrolled in the Moodle course. I am therefore able to access the course.

A quick check via Course Administration | Users | Enrolled users confirms that all three persons have been enrolled into the course. Kuala Aloha, Rio Carnival and I, the Instructor.

Screen 26. At the course "How to use a joystick for air combat maneuvers" page,  a check on the

user enrollments screen shows that I, the Instructor, and both Kuala Aloha and Rio Carnival are enrolled in the course.

Mission accomplished!

Conclusion

The Edwiser Bulk Purchase Extension is a well written WordPress plugin that I find essential for any web developer who wants to sell Moodle courses online. It is easy to use and will lesson the workload of any instructor, manager or office administrator who wants to make a single payment for a Moodle course and yet enroll multiple students or users.

This extension is what software should be: taking the tedium out of office administration and making it easy for the end-user to get the job done. If you are in the business of selling your Moodle course online, I highly recommend the Edwiser Bulk Purchase Extension.

To recap, once again here is the flagship Edwiser Bridge and ALL 4 extensions:

These quality software products provide you with a one-stop shop for all your LMS development needs. Through them you can successfully setup an E-Commerce system that sells Moodle courses online using WordPress and WooCommerce.

The adept developers at Edwiser truly live up to their claim of being a developer of  powerful platform integration solutions and neoteric user-experiences that build innovative e-learning products.

It has been a pleasure writing these five last posts, and I wish you all the best in your E-Commerce systems.

Regards
Frankie Kam

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