Moodle 1.9 Meta Course Structure

Meta Courses aid in:

• Efficient sharing of information
• Efficient enrolment
• Easier to handle courses. 

At our college we use Meta Courses to structure our courses and how the students see the correct material. We have 5208 courses in Moodle and of these 608 are meta courses. We use meta courses to structure the same content that needs to be seen by many different groups and courses without having to upload it multiple times. Our college covers a wide range of qualifications such as Alevels, BTEC's, City and Guilds and Cache and these are in areas such as Sport, Business, Engineering, Art and Animal Sciences. Students on the different courses often need to see similar content;

• Shared Units
• Shared Assignments
• Shared Information. 
• College Information. 
• Different years for the same course.

For our moodle instalation we created two very large courses (we call these our child courses). These are called 'all_stud' and 'all_staff'. These, as you can guess, have all of the students on one and all of the staff on another. The users of each group can be distinguished from each other by their usernames. Students have a number and staff have their initial and surname. With this in mind I created an automatic script that searched for anyone who has a number in their username and add it to all_student (if they were not already there). (as a side note, my enrolment script also auto adds them to the correct child course ('all_stud' or 'all_staff')). A similar script adds to 'all_stud' and 'front_page_teacher'.

Our Child Courses
All of our child courses are created automatically based on cron information taken from our MIS database system. These have a course code such as 'F108' or 'X1056' along with the year the course started. For example:
              'X101-11' or 'X101-12'
There full name would be something like:
              'X101-11 Alevel Maths' or 'TT897-12 BTEC Extended Diploma Animation'.

Our child courses have the students enrolled onto them, but have no content and have no teachers enrolled on them. The child courses are hidden and in hidden separate categories. For example all Alevel courses would be in an Alevel categories called 'ALVL' that is hidden. The students don't know that they are on these course codes.

A student will only ever be on a course code/child course once, but they may be on more than one course code/child course.

The child courses are then added to specific meta courses so the students can see the correct material.

Our Meta Courses
Our Meta Courses have English names, such as 'BTEC Diploma in Animal Care' and are in non hidden categories. For example Alevel Maths meta course would be in a category called 'Sixth Form Centre/Alevel'.

Our Meta Courses have no direct student enrolments, have content and have teachers directly added to them. These meta courses are what students see and it is these that the teachers add content to.

Automatically connecting the Child to Meta
During the automatic enrolment script I created, Moodle gets given a csv with new courses. The short name of the course is the course code (X101-12). The csv script looks for all courses of the previous year (X101-11) and automatically adds the new course as child courses to the meta courses of the previous year course.

Our Core meta Courses
All staff and all students needed to be able to see some core information:

• Library Information
• Front Page
• Student Services

These courses can be found on the front page as links (though we are currently reviewing these pages and making them websites and not courses).

Linking with Qualifications
I have created and written a Qualification and Grade Tracker system into Moodle. This system lets us track qualification, units and criteria for BTECs (and City and guild, Alevels and Cache being built currently). I needed a way to add students to qualifications and for teachers to view the qualifications.

In our MIS we have a child course code per qualification and so this meant I could just add our qualifications to child courses. Then I just allowed teachers to view qualifications that were attached to child courses of meta courses they had access to. This gives something like:

Changes we have made to Moodle to make things smoother
In order to work with meta courses more efficiently we have had to create some blocks and scripts that will aid us:

• Course search allows us to see all parent courses of a child courses.
• Course search allows us to quickly see all child courses a meta course has.
• As child courses are hidden, we have created an admin view that will allow us to see hidden courses a student is enrolled on. 
• We needed to hide such courses as 'Library', 'IT Hints and Tips' and 'How to use Moodle' from appearing in the students profile. 
• We have had to change some ILP, Emailing and cron scripts to take into consideration our structure.