I am still very new to Moodle. But loving it so far. I have a course, that I want to teach in 10 sections. Meaning, I want to have 10 different groups all taking the same course.
If I could have all my wishes come true. I would like to have a master course, and then have 10 child courses, that were the same as the master course. If I change something in the master course, the child courses change automatically, But if someone wants to augment their child course for their students, they can, but it doesn't affect the master course.
Does this make sense to any one but me? And if so, is this somehow available in moodle and I haven't read it yet?
Thanks
Mark Weiss
Hi - first of all - you want 10 different groups taking the same course; that's fine. Second - why do you need a master course and ten child courses? Why not just use the one course for your ten groups? If you are thinking that teacher 1 might want to add something just for class 1 but not affect classes 2-10 then you can do that in Moodle by turning on groupings and making your classes groupings. Then class 1 would just see that resource and the other classes wouldn't. Better than your master course>ten child courses set up. Have a look at groupings. (We set our courses up per year -eg Year 7 geography - and there are 4 teachers and 8 classes. They all use the same course. Individual teachers add resources for their classes -it doesn' matter to us if other classes see them (you could always specify This is for class A) but we could if we wanted to, use the groupings facility as I mentioned above.)
I agree with this. We do the same thing for our senior geography classes (although I'm not starting a geography thing here!). By keeping to one course we avoid duplication. There's the added benefit that students see everything even if only one class was given it. This avoids issues of why-didn't-we-get-that syndrome. It also allows teachers to access all the material even if they didn't get a copy first off.
Cheers,
Paul
Cheers,
Paul
If there is a real reason for having separate courses for different groups (many teachers really prefer it for whatever reasons), you can try meta-course approach: you would create a separate course for each group and a master course, a meta-course with those other 10 courses as its participants. There is no replication involved here -- all common materials and activities are in the master course and group courses have only stuff specific for that group.
As a new user to me, it looks like we have two possible solutions to the same problem, a teacher with multiple sessions of the same course. The teacher can have a single course and use groups to identify the students in the individual sessions. The alternative is to have multiple courses and each course be part of a meta-course.
What I would like to know is which of these two have you chosen and why? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each approach? Would you choice change if a different teacher was teaching some of the sessions and another teaching the rest?
Hi,
We use both approaches.
For writing & language arts courses with multiple sections (same course but different teachers), we make multiple individual instances of the course. These are session-based courses with set start & end dates.
For math/comp sci/science courses, which are individually paced and begin and end every day & also allow for postponements, we use metacourse and child course with student capability to view hidden courses in which they are enrolled AND with groups.
For this latter situation, we need to be able to shift students from one group (Instructor A) to another (Instructor B) in, say, Algebra I, if, when a student un-postpones, Instructor A is full. Thus, groups.
This is the limit of my understanding of metacourses, since my involvement is with multiple sections. If you need more about metacourses, I can ask my compatriot on the metacourse side to write a fuller explanation.
We use both approaches.
For writing & language arts courses with multiple sections (same course but different teachers), we make multiple individual instances of the course. These are session-based courses with set start & end dates.
For math/comp sci/science courses, which are individually paced and begin and end every day & also allow for postponements, we use metacourse and child course with student capability to view hidden courses in which they are enrolled AND with groups.
For this latter situation, we need to be able to shift students from one group (Instructor A) to another (Instructor B) in, say, Algebra I, if, when a student un-postpones, Instructor A is full. Thus, groups.
This is the limit of my understanding of metacourses, since my involvement is with multiple sections. If you need more about metacourses, I can ask my compatriot on the metacourse side to write a fuller explanation.