Creating Courses
Once the Add a new course button has been selected from within the Course categories menu, Moodle directs you to the screen where the course details have to be entered. These details are identical to the course settings that can be edited from within a course by a teacher. The only difference is that, by default, the teacher does not have the right to change the category the course belongs to.
The following settings are available:
Enrolment per se is dealt with in the second part of this chapter. Here, we only cover the basic settings as shown in the following screenshot:
The remaining settings of cover groups, availability, language and roles are shown in the following screenshot:
Once a course has been created, you can assign the users to various roles in the course (that is enrolling students and assigning teachers). We have dedicated the entire Roles Management section (Chapter 6) to roles and will have to ignore this for now. After this step, which will be covered in the later chapter, the course is ready for the teacher to be constructed.
Meta Courses—Sharing Enrolment across Courses
Meta courses are courses which take their enrolment from other courses. They populate many courses from one enrolment or one course from many enrolments. This is useful in the following scenarios:
- Multiple courses want to share information or resources (meta course)
- A course is part of a qualification where students have to be enrolled in a number of courses; each course is set up as a meta course
Both scenarios are depicted in the following screenshot:
The teachers have the right to set the Meta courses parameter in Course settings and then manage its dependents via the Child courses menu in the course administration block. While it is the role of the teacher to manage meta courses, experience has shown that the administrator is frequently asked to set these up on the behalf of others.
To set up the first scenario where the meta course holds shared resources, you have to create all four courses and change the Meta course parameter in the course settings of the Computer Science Resources Course to Yes. This will trigger the display of the Child courses link in the course administration block. When you follow it, you will be able to select the three programming courses as shown in the following image:
To model the second scenario, you will have to create all 13 courses (one course for MSc Software Engineering and a course for each unit) and set the Meta course flag in each unit course to Yes. You will then have to go to the Child courses link in each unit course and select the MSc course as the dependent.
Course Requests—Enabling Teachers to Ask for New Courses
Only the administrators or course creators (or any other role with the course creation rights) are allowed to create new courses. In order to streamline the procedure for requesting courses, especially in larger organizations, Moodle offers a course requesting facility. This has to be enabled in Courses | Course request in the Site Administration block:
As soon as the feature is enabled, each teacher has the ability to request new courses (via the Course request button on the All courses screen). The information that has to be provided is:
- Full name
- Short name
- Summary
- Reasons for wanting the course
- Enrolment key (optional)
A new button labeled Courses pending approval appears in the familiar Course categories screen (Courses | Add/edit courses). When you select it, a list of requested courses is shown, which you can then approve or reject by selecting the appropriate link.
When you approve a screen, the familiar course settings screen appears, which contains the provided values of the course, and also the default category specified in the system settings.
If you reject a course, a reason has to be given, which is then emailed to the requester.