It can be tricky getting to grips with the notion of metacourses and child courses. This explanation should help.
As Moodle's online documentation says here (16/7/11):
http://docs.moodle.org/20/en/Metacourse
...'Some people like to think of them [child courses] as parent courses.' Arrgh!
I had a bog-standard educational structure as follows (see Figure 1 below)...
Two university degree programmes which 'owned' their own courses, but also shared a number of courses (courses 4 and 5 in the diagram above). The big question is, should the programme areas be metacourses OR should the sub-courses be metacourses?
The important thing to remember is that a metacourse cannot enrol students. An easier way of thinking about this is that students can only enrol on a child course! Students on a metacourse are automatically enrolled from any linked child course.
- SCENARIO 1 (problem. See Figure 2 below): If the programme areas are made metacourses, then students cannot enrol on a programme and automatically be linked to the right child courses (an ideal scenario). Instead, they have to enrol separately on a sub-course. That automatically makes them a member of the right (owning) programme, BUT, those students still have to enrol onto the other sub-courses of their programme, separately.
- SCENARIO 2 (solution. See Figure 3 below): If the sub-courses are made metacourses, then students can enrol onto a programme, and automatically be made members of the programme child courses that are linked to it.
The only problem with the scenario 2 solution, is if you want students to be able to view sub-courses that are not part of the programme area they are enrolled on (e.g. someone on degree programme 2, being able to view course 3). It should be possible for a student enrolling on a child course (e.g. degree programme 2) to be made a student member of courses 4 to 8 inclusive, but a guest member of courses 1 to 3 inclusive. Likewise, a student enrolling on the child course 'degree programme 1' could have systems set so that they are automatically made a member of courses 1 to 5 inclusive, and a guest member of 6 to 8 inclusive.
The important thing to remember is that, at the moment, everything works from the CHILD course, not the metacourse (as Moodle's nomenclature might suggest). I think Moodle have got the nomenclature wrong. The functionality associated with a metacourse, should be called 'child course' and the functionality associated with a child course (enrollable on to) should be called 'metacourse'. Even though parents usually 'feed' their children, in moodlespeak, the child course is the feeder course!
