Fiona,

The point is that you don't have to enroll them in the courses. They can see all the courses by default, as I read the doc.

Previously, this would have been a system wide role (in 1.9) and you would have ticked the invisible button so they were not visible to students (teachers and such could see them in participants), but you would not have needed to manually enroll them in each course.  Other users works the same way.