Moodle cohorts - managing enrollments in them

I set up a cohort last year and have not thought about it since.  Typical theme here.  I got an email from my customer that included an excel file that had most of the information needed to *update the cohort.  That is not exactly the way the email read, it was more like this

"james - here is an updated list for the math cadre 2015.  the list contains new members, *no account in system, and members that already exist.  anyone else in the course can be removed."

Translated, this is what it meant and what I had to do

• Remove manual enrollments from the course.
• Create some new accounts
• Enroll the new accounts into the course - via the cohort
• Remove some enrollments from the cohort
• Add some existing accounts to the cohort.

I started wondering if the cohort was such a good solution.

I concluded that it was because, even though I was only dealing with a single course, it was easier to update the members of the cohort than to remove enrollments from the course.

Cohort is only enrolled once in the course.

Editing the members of the cohort was pretty simple.  Site Admin | Users | Accounts | cohorts

Clicking on the enrollment icon under the Edit colomn brings up the simple and clean interface to add / remove members to the cohort.

When I look in the course at the enrollments - all the members show, each with the enrollment type of cohort.

Moral of the story?  Cohorts are pretty useful and can be editing/updated easily.  And, if I want to remove everyone from the course at once OR I want to enroll everyone into another course - I simply have to un-enroll or enroll the cohort, once.  Good stuff moodle.