Understanding Combined Courses

Owned by Justin Aakre
Last updated: Oct 18, 2023
3 min read

Summary

Moodle has several methods of combining different courses or sections to make the load on the teacher easier. By teaching in one course shell instead of multiple, there is less work that needs to be done. There are also benefits for the Registrar's office for tracking enrollment. The various methods include cross-listed courses and meta-courses.

There are three types of grouped courses possible in Moodle:

  • Cross-listed Courses (XL designation): Cross-listed courses are preferred as these are set up via a request from your Department schedule manager working with the Registrar's office when course loads are submitted.  All the work is handled by Academic Affairs and the Registrar's office and you as a faculty just look for the "grouped" version of the course labelled as XL in your My Courses list in Moodle. If a cross-listed course exists, it is important to use this course as it includes all students. 
  • Courses or course sections taught by DIFFERENT faculty:  If you wish to create a "master" meta-course for all sections of a multi-faculty, multi-section course, please fill out the Moodle Request for Jira.  We will create your meta-course and add all the sections into the course. This is most common for courses like CWC where there are many sections with the same content. It's also common for courses where different schools, such as CAPS and CAS, are sharing a course. 

  • Courses or course sections taught by a SINGLE faculty: If you wish to create a meta-course from courses or sections of a course that you teach, then there are two possibilities.

      1. If you wish to have both the individual courses/sections AND a SEPARATE grouped meta-course, please fill out the Moodle Request for Jira. We will first create the new course and then add the other courses/sections into the meta-course.  This would result in a section 1, section 2, and a meta-course page. This is commonly done to be able to use the individual sections along with the combined course.
      2. If you only plan on using the grouped multi-section meta-course, then you can create your own meta-course via the following method.

Appearance in Moodle

Cross-listed Courses

A cross-listed course is identified by the XL designation at the end of a course title. The naming scheme will show all courses included in the title.

In the spring of 2023, the tool that creates courses had to be updated. The new tool does not follow the same naming protocol. Below is a screenshot of how courses are now created. Courses are manually updated to the standard name format. As this is a manual process, it is not uncommon for a course to appear as below prior to the semester. 

The individual sections of the cross-listed course will also appear in Moodle. These sections can be left alone, but they do control enrollment for the cross-listed course. The individual sections duplicate the participants to the cross-listed section. If a student, teacher, or teaching assistant appears in the individual section, the enrollment will be copied to the cross-listed course.

Meta-Courses

A meta-course is identified by the .m designation at the end of a course title. The naming scheme will show all courses included in the title.

The individual unused courses will also appear in Moodle. These sections can be left alone, but they do control enrollment for the meta-course. The individual sections duplicate the participants to the meta-course. If a student, teacher, or teaching assistant appears in the individual section, the enrollment will be copied to the meta-course.