cohort vs meta course for enrolments

cohort vs meta course for enrolments

by Susan Mangan -
Number of replies: 3

Hi - using v.3.0.3

We use external DB enrolment method to create courses and add enrolments to each of these courses based on what is in our SIS.

Often, teachers will want to combine 2 of their course sites into one so both groups of students go to the same site.  To accomodate this we simply use Meta Course Link to attach the enrolments to one site, and the extra site is left hidden and unused.  Now with the bulk meta course enrolment tool it is much more convenient to make these accommodations for teachers that want to combine more than 2 sites.

We've been using Moodle long before Cohorts were introduced.  I've been scouring the documentation and forums and please hit me over the head with a dead fish if I have missed something obvious, but is there anyone who can see any reason why I would choose to change our existing system to use Cohorts to group the students rather than having the students grouped by course using external database enrolment?

TIA!

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In reply to Susan Mangan

Re: cohort vs meta course for enrolments

by Susan Mangan -

anyone? ... mixed

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In reply to Susan Mangan

Re: cohort vs meta course for enrolments

by Emma Richardson -
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No, the two are designed for different things.  Cohorts are designed so that you can enrol a specific group of students to multiple courses.  Meta courses are designed to share resources between multiple courses.

You can do what you are doing either way but I think meta courses is cleaner as you can just share those activities you want between the two classes.  If you switch to cohorts you will end up with students in two different courses which might be confusing for them.

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In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: cohort vs meta course for enrolments

by Susan Mangan -

I get what you are saying and while I understand that the main idea behind a cohort is that you now have the ability to cherry pick students from different common areas to create one unique cohort that you can assign to multiple Moodle course sites, for some reason by brain is still stuck on this idea of using cohorts for standard student registrations as well as ones that are not so standard.  I will figure it out!

Thanks again for your feedback on this!

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