A Moodle course can get its enrollments from other courses, making it easy to share course materials among any grouping of existing courses. The most obvious application is to have a single course site for multiple sections, but it is just as easy for us to share between a biology and an economics course, and to later add a geography course to that collaboration.

We often refer to a combined course as a metacourse, a term no longer used in Moodle but still applicable.  We refer to the courses which provide the enrollments for the combined, “metacourse,” as child courses. Normally the professor will make the combined course visible to students while keeping the child courses hidden but there are other use-cases.

Course Groups are created automatically in the combined course for the child course students (and Teachers) and students will automatically be enrolled (but they will not be removed from a group automatically) These Groups can be used when managing Grades (e.g., filtering views) and monitoring course participation when this feature is enabled. You can even create separate course objects (e.g., Assignments, Discussions) for the child-course Groups  within the combined course.

Uses: Combined courses can be used instead of the “child” courses (as most professors do when teaching multiple sections of a course). Mail can be sent from or grades maintained in those child courses even though they are not made visible to students.

Combined courses can also be used in conjunction with visible “child” courses if this fits your needs (as when courses from different disciplines collaborate). Students will probably need some direction on why they see two Moodle courses and how they are to use them.

Another use for this “metacourse” concept is for courses which really don’t need to change each semester. Rather than create a new course and Import existing content into it we can simply remove the old child enrollments and add new ones. This does not apply to academic courses.

How To: 

Enable the use of course Groups

A recent change to Moodle requires a change to course settings to take advantage of most Group features such as Grades filtering. Note: this is not required to use Groups within Moodle’s Quickmail email block. 

Combine courses – Use the self-service option or submit a request to the ITS Service Desk. You should do this before creating content in any child course (a combined course is newly created and will not include content from any of the child courses, only the enrollments, and you will need to Import any existing content).

Manually enroll participants – Enroll collaborators or students in the combined course or any child course as you wish (via Participants | Enroll users).

Maintaining Groups  – While students are automatically added to the appropriate “section” Group when they enroll in that section, they are never removed and can never be removed. This can be a problem when a student switches between your course sections; due to a Moodle bug they will be a member of both groups. If you are using Groups where participation is exclusive and not optional, you must contact ITS for help. More information about this issue is here.