Four ways students get into your class, and what picking wrong costs

How students get into your class decides more than it looks like it does: who can join, how much administration you carry, and how often you answer the message that says "I can't get in".

There are four ways, and picking the wrong one is the most common cause of that message.

The four

Open. Anyone with an account can enrol themselves from the catalogue. Right for a trial class, or material you actively want circulated.

Code. The class is visible in the catalogue, but enrolling needs an eight-character code you hand out. This suits most tutoring centres: a prospective student can read the syllabus first, and only the people you gave the code to get in.

Invitation only. Entry is by invitation link, sent by you. Nobody you did not send it to can get in.

Closed. Nobody enrols themselves at all. You add students individually or in bulk. This is what a school uses for a timetabled class, where the roll comes from the student record system rather than from a student's initiative.

The eight-character code, and why it has that shape

A join code gets read out in a room, written on a board, and typed into a phone by someone in a hurry.

So it is short, and its alphabet is chosen so nothing can be confused when read aloud. A code containing both the letter O and the digit zero is a code that will be mistyped, and every mistype is one more message arriving for you.

Enrolling twice breaks nothing

This sounds trivial and it saves whole afternoons.

A student who presses enrol twice, or opens the same invitation from two devices, does not produce two enrolments or an error. The second attempt simply answers that they are already in.

A system that treats that as a failure manufactures work for you out of unnecessary panic.

When it does fail, the reason is named

There are a handful of reasons enrolment gets refused, and they are kept distinct: the class was not found, enrolment is closed, the code is wrong, the invitation has expired, or the class is full.

That matters for you rather than for the student. "Wrong code" and "class is full" call for two different actions from you, and an error message that merges them moves the job of working out which onto your shoulders, usually through a long conversation.

One thing that is not checked at enrolment

Your plan's student limit is not checked when a student joins a class. It is checked when the person creates an account.

The reason: one student can be enrolled in six of your classes and is still one person. Counting class enrolments against the cap would penalise you for splitting your material into several tidy courses instead of piling it into one.

Choosing

If you want prospective students to read the syllabus before deciding — and usually you do, because a good syllabus sells itself — choose code. The catalogue is open; the door is not.

Use invitation only for private or small-group classes that are not on offer.

Use open only when you genuinely do not mind who joins.

And closed when the roll was never the student's decision to make.