Moodle - Metacourses the easy option for Primaries?

[SimpleSi]

I find assigning pupils to courses is a major pain in the neck in primary schools without external class/pupil enrollement databases.

But I'm looking at metacourses and I hoping this will do the job

If I create a dummy "child" course for each teaching class and assign all the pupils for that class onto that dummy "child" course then I can then just create a real course as metacourse and just associate the right "child" course to this metacourse and all the pupils assigned to the "child" course will be enrolled into the real course?

e.g Create a dummy course - call it Child Year 6
Assign all year 6 pupils to Child Year 6
Create a proper course Learn How to Scratch
Set Learn How to Scratch as a metacourse
Associate Child Year 6 to Learn How to Scratch

Does it work like this?

Answers only from people who've done this please

regards

Simon

Or if you wrote the handbook

[stevehill06]

I find assigning pupils to courses is a major pain in the neck in primary schools without external class/pupil enrollement databases.

But I'm looking at metacourses and I hoping this will do the job

If I create a dummy "child" course for each teaching class and assign all the pupils for that class onto that dummy "child" course then I can then just create a real course as metacourse and just associate the right "child" course to this metacourse and all the pupils assigned to the "child" course will be enrolled into the real course?

e.g Create a dummy course - call it Child Year 6
Assign all year 6 pupils to Child Year 6
Create a proper course Learn How to Scratch
Set Learn How to Scratch as a metacourse
Associate Child Year 6 to Learn How to Scratch

Does it work like this?

Answers only from people who've done this please

regards

Simon

Or if you wrote the handbook

Yes Simon, it does work like that. Anyone that is a participant of your dummy course will be a participant of your proper courses.

Steve

[beeswax]

Could this be taken one step further? For example, I have a group of Year 7s in a metacourse (Y7) and they're associated with all the child courses in Year 7. At the end of the school year they naturally move up to Year 8. Could I disassociate that Y7 metacourse from all the child courses in Year 7, and then associate it with child courses in Year 8?

[stevehill06]

Yes that would work as well. I would call that all the Yr7 students are in the Year of Entry to the school and then you wouldn't have to change the name of the course each year.

[SimpleSi]

Anyone that is a participant of your dummy course will be a participant of your proper courses.

At last - a win with Moodle

(But is it just me - did they get the meta/child naming the wrong way around???)

This means I won't have do the silly surname naming anymore

I used to have to make their surnames include year of leaving and teachers had to select and pick all the pupils from their year

Now just have to select the pupils for that year/class once

And since one school is getting me to download courses from other sites and upload them to theirs - it'll save me a a lot of hassle and make it easy for them in the future when they create their own

regards

Simon

[secretlife]

Could this be taken one step further? For example, I have a group of Year 7s in a metacourse (Y7) and they're associated with all the child courses in Year 7. At the end of the school year they naturally move up to Year 8. Could I disassociate that Y7 metacourse from all the child courses in Year 7, and then associate it with child courses in Year 8?

Beeswax - don't you mean it the other way round? Your course with all your Y7 in (who would be Y8 the following year) is your child course and all the year 7 or 8 courses you want your children in would be metacourses.
I have mixed feelings about metacourses (aside of the fact that the terminology is extremely difficult to get your head round - although someone on moodle.org actually justified its use on a post; I can't remember how - I agree with people here - it ought to be reversed. For us in secondary the main disadvantage is that it doesn't carry groups forward with it, so if you have courses with several sets then metacourses aren't much use. We use them for staff - I have a metacourse called moodle training and a child course "staffroom" is associated to it. So everytime we have a new member of staff, they get put in the staffroom course and are automatically enrolled in the moodletraining metacourse.

[SimpleSi]

Of course - Moodle makes things 2x harder than it needs to be again

When you restore a course it ignores the site default that all courses should be assumed to be metacourses AND your not given the option of specifying it as a metacourse when you do the import

So you have to do the import (a fun task when you've been asked to import about 50 courses ) and then you have to

Click on Settings
Tell it its a metacourse
Save Changes

(Does it ask you automatically at this point to select the child course - NO!!)

Find Child Courses on admin menu
And finally assign the child course



regards

Simon

[secretlife]

Si - if you use backup and restore you can specify it's a metacourse and it will restore as a metacourse - I just did it and it worked. EDIT_ ah you aren't backing up metacourses; you are wanting them to become metacourses when you restore (I just saw your question on moodle.org)

[beeswax]

Beeswax - don't you mean it the other way round? Your course with all your Y7 in (who would be Y8 the following year) is your child course and all the year 7 or 8 courses you want your children in would be metacourses.
I have mixed feelings about metacourses (aside of the fact that the terminology is extremely difficult to get your head round - although someone on moodle.org actually justified its use on a post; I can't remember how - I agree with people here - it ought to be reversed. For us in secondary the main disadvantage is that it doesn't carry groups forward with it, so if you have courses with several sets then metacourses aren't much use. We use them for staff - I have a metacourse called moodle training and a child course "staffroom" is associated to it. So everytime we have a new member of staff, they get put in the staffroom course and are automatically enrolled in the moodletraining metacourse.

Yes, now that I've tried it, it should be the other way round.