When a student registers for courses through the student registration interface, or when a staff member creates a student with the "New Student" button, it represents an application.

Student applications can be identified based on the "Verify ID" button that will be visible:

You can also find all applications with Advanced Search by selecting "Unverified" from the "Stage" dropdown.

When you click the "Verify ID" button, it will open the identity verification panel:

You use this interface to indicate that you have received official proof of identification and stored it on file. You can select the type of identification that you have on file for later reference.

This must be done before you can enrol the student in any courses.

Adding ID attaches a student's Moodle account to their record

When you verify the identity of a student, it converts the entry from an application to a student record. At the time this happens, SMS will check for an existing Moodle account using the email address on the application's record. Then,

1. If no Moodle account is found with that email, SMS will create a Moodle account
2. If a Moodle account is found with that email, SMS will attach the record to that account

The SMS will tell you before you click the button what will happen. In the above screenshot, the SMS is indicating it will create a new account for that student. If the SMS found an existing account, it will display information about the account.

Once you have verified a student's ID, the Moodle account attachment is fixed. You may continue to change the student's ID or personal information. If you change the email on the student record, SMS will update the Moodle account to match.

You can reduce student support later on by verifying thoroughly

As the verification process cannot be undone, and the student record cannot be attached to a different Moodle account later on, it's important to confirm the information is correct before verifying a student's ID.

<aside> 💡 If your Moodle instance creates accounts in multiple ways (for e.g. through SMS, self-registration, or district accounts), students can end up with multiple accounts when they use a variety of email addresses if not carefully checked. This can be confusing to students. Confirming with the student beforehand is the best way to avoid this.

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Each district will have their own checklist process for verification, depending on your needs, but we recommend you consider:

• Verifying the student's provided form of identification
• Verifying that the student's course requests make sense for their learning goals
• Confirming that the student does not have a Moodle account or that the Moodle account identified by the Verify ID step is indeed the correct one
• Confirming that the student has not already registered for distance learning with you

Deletion of a student record or application

Student applications can be deleted by clerical users or administrators. Once a student has had their ID verified, the student record can only be deleted by an administrator. You may need to do this if a student has incorrectly created a duplicate account and it must be deleted.

Deleting verified students should be done with caution as it will not automatically clean up the Moodle account and will irretrievably lose any SMS-specific information about that student record, which maybe required for audit purposes. We recommend you store any relevant reports before deleting an active student record.

The administrative student record deletion feature is primarily for fixing mismatched accounts. If you find you only need to clean up old student records, consider the Cleanup Tools.