@Ian did you check this: https://help.docebo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020084340-Managing-Self-Enrollments-and-Waiting-Lists

the smaller text below the options gives you a general idea of their functions 

Thanks for the answers, @alekwo and @lrnlab.

Alek, the article you linked highlights my point:

• Only Admin can enroll learners. Use this option if you want to make the course visible in catalogs, but do not want learners to self-enroll in the course. In this scenario, only Superadmins (and Power Users with granted permissions) are able to enroll users in the course.

The point I was trying to make is, if I don’t want learners to self-enroll in the course, why would I ever select “Self-enrollments are available” for the previous setting?

Incidentally, the tooltips and the article are also misaligned - compare the tooltip for “Self-enrollments are not available”:

Learners will see the course as locked in catalogs unless they are enrolled

with what the the Knowledge Base article says:

• self-enrollments are not available, and the course is not visible in catalogs

“Locked in catalogs” and “not visible in catalogs” are not the same thing. But I’m not sure it matters which description is correct, because ultimately this seems to be a catalog visibility setting that is both

1. redundant, because I could just select “Show the course only to enrolled learners” under Course Visibility in Catalogs; and
2. extremely poorly labelled, because it apparently has nothing to do with self-enrollment at all.

(I could even quibble with the idea of “pending admin approval” being described as “self-enrollment”, but I can at least understand the use case for that one.)

The point I was trying to make is, if I don’t want learners to self-enroll in the course, why would I ever select “Self-enrollments are available” for the previous setting?

@Ian I agree, this is misleading labeling of the option on Docebo’s side.

The first option is not about the ability to self-enroll but about any enrollments being open/available. The labels of this setting shouldn’t have the “Self-” part and be like “Enrollments are not available”, “Enrollments are available”, and “Enrollments are available during a specific time period”.

Only the second option is controlling who can initiate the enrollment, and if the user is allowed to self-enroll. 

@Ian on the positive side, you can edit those labels in the localization tool, so they won’t be misleading to users. 

Can I clarify what you mean by this, Alek? We have a number of courses with the “Self-enrollments are not available” setting selected, but it has not stopped us (as super admins at least) from enrolling people in those courses.

Fair observation re: localization as a workaround. The reason this came up was a bit different though; I’m working on a Docebo Connect recipe to “enforce” certain internal policies regarding course configurations (where appropriate). For example, we don’t want custom settings to be enabled for Rating & Sharing: we want the platform defaults to apply globally. If our Power Users touch these configurations (despite us asking them not to), we can reset it automatically.

But with these fields, I realized I wasn’t quite sure what, if anything, our policy should be, because the labeling is so weird.

And then I think I just got mad about the principle. 

@Ian indeed, it’s all confusing, as a superadmin, you can always enroll a user… maybe this should be more like “Disable non-admin-initiated enrollments and hide the course in catalogs”