General help

Hi Alistair,

I agree with you. Moodle docs says "Meta courses inherit their enrollments, (and other role assignments(*), from these other course(s) instead of having students added manually".

I also thought that this was the wrong way around and thought that logically the meta course would be the course that other courses inherit from.

Of your two suggestions 'push' enrolmenent and 'pull enrolment' seem more user-friendly to me.

~thomas

I think everyone agrees that these are at least the wrong way around and/or need renaming.

I don't like "derived enrollment" as that seems the wrong way around as well

BTW I don't know how long meta-course have been around but I've been moodling for about 3-4 years and I've only just worked out what they do and its saving me the trouble of arranging user surnames into class orders (working in six UK primary 5-11 year old schools) so teachers can pick out their pupils for each course.

I think the child courses should not be called courses - something like enrollment groups but since group is already a used term, I've put a thesaurus onto it and I'd suggest enrollment pool or club

Then all courses could have option to use enrollment pools and no need to call them anything special - after all, we don't call courses that use groups anything special

regards

Simon

Hi all,
Several of us, as Mary points out, recently woke up to the function vrs common English language/logic usage that was preventing intuitive understanding of metacourses.

Metacourse has been around a while, I do not see a name change in the future I had to look up "meta"and found wikipedia helpful. The Ancient Greeks used it to mean "with", "after" and "following". From the student standpoint (our ultimate user), a Metacourse, can not be accessed or stand on its own until it is linked to a course that comes before it.

No offense to the initial concept, what is wrong with the terminology is that what comes before a metacourse is called "a child"! This does not boggle the mind of an Anthropologist who enjoys reading Science Fiction, but most common folks are not going to consider this as merely a strange cultural concept.

Why not simply use the words "linked courses" for the teacher to select, instead of "child". We can further explain it by saying that the linked courses "push" their enrolments to the metacourse. I personally would try to avoid the words"dependent" or "conditional".

Excellent set of posts, which I found helpful to sharpen my own MoodleLogic. I guess if I feel strongly about it, I should make one of my rare visits to Tracker and suggest changing "child".

Chris