Akeeba Subscription - Auto-unenroll when membership expires

Hi Antonio

Our site will be offering online courses which may be bought and accessed in the following ways:

• Through voucher or online payment, buying one course at a time
• Through subscription allowing unlimited enrollments for as long as membership fees are paid
• Through business membership where company representatives may enroll personnel in courses and monitor their progress and enrollments are valid for as long as membership fees are kept up to date

For the membership plans we will need a way of telling joomdle and hikashop whether a person has unlimited access to courses or if they must buy courses through the store (in other words are they subscribed or not). Then we need to be able to controll access to enrolled courses based on subscription status. If your subscription is valid you are allowed to access the courses you enrolled for. If not you should either renew your subscription or go buy the course in the store.

We should also be able to control whether users are limited or unlimited on the number of courses they are enrolled in at any one time.

Is there a way which we can already achieve any or all of the above criteria or does it require further development? Would you be willing to consider having a look at it?

Thanks in advance!

Hi there,

For the most part what you require is achievable already. The method of purchase, voucher, online payment, offline, etc. will be determined by Hikashop. Joomdle is technically not aware of the payment method but rather whether a payment has been made or not. So if you can pay it in Hikdashop, VM, etc then it will work with Joomdle.

Similarly, for subscriptions Joomdle integrates with a couple of options leaving you to determine which you prefer. Once your user has subscribe to a subscription plan, Joomdle will pick that up.

With regards to business memberships, you can leverage the parent features. Instead of a parent, you have a HR manager, etc. As for monitoring their progress that is debatable whether Joomdle will provide you with you require. You will need to be a little more specific about this part.

Finally, courses can be grouped in bundles (of courses) and sold as a bundle or individually. Your term unlimited access is a little vague at this point as it could mean unlimited to any number of courses or unlimited to any length of time, etc. So depending on what you require here, there maybe a little work to do.

Hi Chris

Thanks for replying.

I have actualle discovered the functionality shortly after posting this. I must say that it is rather unappealing at the moment. We have 120 courses and Id like to give people unlimited access to them. Having them enrolled in 120 courses at one time makes it impossible to show only the courses they busy with. Id like to just give them the ability to choose which courses they are interested in and then enroll for those only.

I am investigating the use of discounts in hikashop. They will get 100% discount on all courses being a member. But then I still dont know what will happen to the enrollment once the membership expires. Will they be unenrolled?

Ive been using the course bundles for other purposes. I do rather like the idea of parent enrollments and have been looking at it. I think I should be able to use it successfully.

Sorry I am a little confused as your requirement then. You want to give them:
- unlimited access to all courses
- but yet not all 120 at a time
- one payment for unlimited access

Is the above correct? Then how would you manage access to the courses? How would you prohibit them from enrolling in all courses at once? Or are you saying they must only be involved in 1 course at a time? Or 2 at a time? 10 at a time?

I am trying to understand your business logic as it relates to user / student engagement because giving unlimited access but on a limited manner seems rather tedious for an administrator to manage. Because if it is left to the user/student, what is stopping them from enrolling in all?

Hi Chris

Instead of having to buy one course at a time, paying for each course, we want to offer a subscription service where subscribers can selectively enrol into courses that interest them.

With the current way it works with Akeeba Subs you are enrolled into all 120 courses (120 in our case) at one time. In essence this is not an issue because then they are automatically enrolled and unenrolled based on their subscription status.

Now imagine this. As a subscriber you are enrolled in 120 courses but at the moment are only interested in one of them. You might consider at a later time enrolling for some other courses which may interest you at that time. In the meantime whenever you want to go to the course you have to browse one continuous list of courses every time you want to return to the course you are currently busy with.

Also, with the bootstrap themes for Joomla one is able to display modules inside of dropdown menus. So I'd like to display in the "My Account" section of the menu a list of courses that you have been enrolled in. So now being enrolled in all 120 courses you get a huge list which you have to scroll to navigate.

The ideal situation would be for a subscriber to choose which courses they are immediately interested in and only enroll for those either through Hikashop of through Joomdle. Hikashop would be the ideal since it's nicely organised with categories. One way I could achieve this is through a restricted discount which applies only to subscribers. I am just not sure how the unenrollment will work. What happens when the subscription expires or is terminated? I suppose the person will remain enrolled in the course until the end of the enrollment period defined in the Joomlde enrollment module in the Moodle course?

If this is how it will work then I think I am fine with it.

Now as for business subscribers.
I've mentioned that I'd like to make use of this functionality but I've come across something that might cause me some headaches. When one enables the "Buy courses for children" setting it disables auto enrollment. I understand why this happens and it makes sense but seeing that I'd like to make this a more exclusive feature it means that my standard non-subscribing and individual subscribing customers will not be automatically enrolled in their courses and won't be able to become enrolled since they don't have access to the functionality.

Do you perhaps have any suggestions regarding this?

It sounds like you would benefit from a credit system. Whereby I purchase a number of "credits". The students choose a few courses which take away from the credits. When they are finished with those courses they choose additional based on how many credits are left. If they run out of credits, they simply buy more.

The advantage is, is that you minimise the enrollments to what is relevant today. The disadvantage is that you will get less upfront payments for all courses but you could work that through payment plans.