Metacourse

Metacourses are courses which take their enrolments from other courses i.e. for every course 'enrolled' on the metacourse, all students in the course are also enrolled in the metacourse.

Each time a student enrols in (or unenrols from) a course, they are enrolled/unenrolled from any metacourse(s) associated with it (although it doesn't happen immediately - it may take an hour to show up).

Please note that metacourse enrolments do not preserve groups.

Metacourse setup

Teachers are able to choose whether a course is a metacourse via the "Is this a metacourse?" (yes/no) menu option in the course settings. In Moodle 1.6, if a meta course is chosen, the students page changes from listing/searching for students to listing/searching for courses. In Moodle 1.7 "Child courses" appears in the teacher's administration block.

Metacourse usage

Metacourses may be used in a variety of ways:

• Scenario 1: X is a metacourse with Course 1 through 4 as normal courses with standard student enrollments. Students enrolling on these courses are automatically enrolled onto Metacourse X. This would be used, for example, when every student gets to choose one option from Courses 1-4 but Metacourse X is compulsory for all students taking one of those four options.

• Scenario 2: Metacourses 1-4 are linked to Y which is a normal course. Students enrolling on Course Y are automatically enrolled on Metacourses 1-4. This would be used, for example, when all five courses are intended to have exactly the same students.

In both diagrams you can see students being enrolled normally into standard courses and then the entire student list of a course being added to the Metacourse.

• Scenario 3: One or more meta courses are used as a library of resources and activities. For example, the English department has collected material useful in writing papers. Teachers can direct or embed a link to a specific reference about citations, or how to select a topic for a paper or suggested reading compiled by students.

See also

• Using Moodle Metacourses? and Metacourses and Roles in 1.7 forum discussions