Hello, all!
Before I explain my situation, I just wanted to let you know that I have read through quite a few pages on the forums here and done some Googling elsewhere, and have not found clear answers to my questions. Frankly, I don't think there's "an" answer, but I am looking for suggestions.
We've recently started our first online course that we opened up to some grant-funded folks before it was really finished. We have been slowly making topics visible as we complete them. In the Spring we will be opening a new "section" of the course for the same audience that will be synchronous version of the same course. That is, it will be weekly format instead of a topics format, and every week a new unit will be live. At the same time, the "section" of the course that we've already started (the self-paced section) will be still available. Both courses will be presenting practically the same material -- I would say 99% of the content (activities, lessons, assignments, quizzes, etc) will be shared.
I am looking at this like a college course treats sections taught by the same professor -- he can print out 30 final exams, 15 for his class on T/TH, 15 for his class on MWF. I want the professor to be able to update the materials in one place, instead of two (or more, down the road).
I also have made heavy use of labels in the course, and do not see how using the meta-course concept to link to activities and resources will help me -- I will still have to copy all of the labels and change them in two places, plus the students will be moving between child and meta courses which seems frustrating. Plus, I don't necessarily care about sharing enrollments which seems to be, for some reason, the big selling point of meta courses.
In short, is there a way -- in 1.9 which we have now or 2.0 which we'll have over the holidays -- to have multiple courses share resources automatically, present them in different ways (topics vs. weekly format) and at different rates (all visible, some hidden), such that editing the materials in one master place affects all of the other courses?
Thanks for your time!