Program content defines a required learning sequence via a hierarchy of courses and course sets.
Students are enrolled into courses when assigned to a program. Enrolments are activated depending on program start dates, completion sequence and program end dates.
This is one of main use cases.
Programs can be used as a full replacement of category and cohort enrolments.
This is another main use case for programs.
All users see the same course category structure in standard course browsing interface. One course cannot be in multiple course categories at the same time.
It is possible to used programs for presentation purposes and rely on standard course enrolment plugins. This way programs can be useful even without user allocations and program completion tracking.
This use case would benefit from Program catalogue improvements or integration of programs into standard course browsing interface.
Programs contain a setting for creating of course groups for program members. If used together with separate group mode then it allows delegation of course enrolment to different trainers that cannot change each others enrolments.
This use case allows better course separation for non-editing trainers with enrolment capability.
Course start date and end dates do not affect enrolments in Moodle. If you put a single course into a program, then program scheduling settings can be used to automatically restrict students access to course.
This use case illustrates the extra functionality of program allocations compared to standard enrolment methods.