For information about the 2020/1 proposed course layout please read this blog post.

At the moment we create a Moodle “course” for every taught unit. This leads to thousands of Moodle “courses” being created which may or may not be used. Within each unit we create Moodle “groups” which separate students into separate “instances” of their course. An example: DACC (HND Accounting). The following units would be created automatically:

F7J735: Business Culture and Strategy
F82H35: Management Accounting for Planning and Control F82J35: Management Accounting for Decision Making F8KF35: Accounting: Graded Unit 2
F8KG35: Accounting: Graded Unit 3
HC4335: Financial Reporting and Analysis
F7J834: Economic Issues: An Introduction
H4J934: Payroll
J0LY35: Business Taxation
DE5H35: Company Law: An Introduction
HC4435: Accounting for Specialised Transactions

Within each unit we create groups (DACC/1A/F0-2020/1, DACC/1C/I0-2020/1). The issue with this approach is that we often do not have a timeous unit list for a course, therefore we sometimes rely on the CDP list of units. This has a knock on effect on the student as they will be enrolled on ALL units for DACC whether core or optional. The alternative is that the students see nothing until their SR1 data is processed.

An alternative current approach is the “Composite” Course. In this case a course is created to serve an entire programme such as DACC. We use a separate page on adminnet to associate DACC students permanently with the composite course.

This has been useful when student / unit relationship data is not available or where course materials are delivered in project or other forms. However, it does cause problems of its own, mainly due to a disconnect between enrolled course (e.g. DACC) and which Moodle courses these relate to. The enrolled course code often bears no relation to the Moodle course (or courses) a student should be seeing. This is particularly apparent in Open Learning where, for example, students of W1PC (PROFESSIONAL COOKERY) should be accessing the Moodle course GM2H21 while the unit list for W1PC contains 12 units, none of which are GM2H21!

The new structure proposal would mean that all students enroled on W1PC would be accessing the hub course within the category W1PC. The taught units can then be added in this category and the appropriate cohorts enroled within them.

The new W1PC course category will look like this:

If any further taught units are to be added to W1PC they can just be created in the W1PC category.