The Essential theme has a feature where instead of "My Courses" it is a drop down the the Latest Courses which is the last 5 or so courses you visited. You might want to look over that code for examples.
To be honest, this is probably the most logical use for the course drop down.
With M3.3 and the updates to My Dashboard I think we are going to want students to utilize the Dashboard more than we do now. The dashboard would give them a listing of all their courses while the Latest Courses would be for quick links to the courses being used most often.