Metacourses are used when a professor is teaching two sections of a course at the same time to reduce the labor of updating both sections. Metacourses work by adding the members of the "child" courses to the metacourse. Resources and activities are added to the metacourse itself, and the course members go to the metacourse site to complete the resources and activities. If you think a metacourse would be useful for you, contact your academic technologist about setting one up.

Students enrolled in a metacourse have access to any material on that course as well as to material in the child course that they were initially enrolled in. Metacourses do not preserve groups and enrollment does not happen immediately. Metacourses take student enrollments from other courses only. Teachers need to be added manually.

Setting up a Metacourse:
Teachers are able to choose whether a course is a metacourse via the "Is this a metacourse?" (yes/no) menu option in the Settings menu of the Administration block.  However, it works best to have an Academic Technologist create a new course that is a metacourse for all the intended child courses. Typically, we would call it "Chemistry 123 all" or something of that nature, to distinguish between that particular page and the original class pages.

Metacourse Scenarios (When Metacourses are Useful):

• X is a metacourse with Course 1 through 4 as normal courses with standard student enrollments. Students enrolling on these courses are automatically enrolled onto Metacourse X.
• Metacourses 1-4 are linked to Y which is a normal course. Students enrolling on Course Y are automatically enrolled on Metacourses 1-4. This would be used, for example, when all five courses are intended to have exactly the same students.
• One or more meta courses are used as a library of resources and activities. For example, the English department has collected material useful in writing papers. Teachers can direct or embed a link to a specific reference about citations, or how to select a topic for a paper or suggested reading compiled by students.
• The metacourse feature can also be used "in reverse." Say you have a Diploma program that involves courses D1, D2, D3, and D4. In this case, you would create a "Diploma" course as a normal course (non-metacourse). You would then designate programs D1 through D4 as metacourses (plus completing the student enrollment task under Course Administration). When a student enrolls in "Diploma", he or she will be automatically enrolled in courses D1 through D4. 

Using a Metacourse

If you are using a metacourse and need to add students or other teachers to the course, you must go to the child course page and assign roles there. See our page on Assigning Roles for more information about adding students and teachers.

To add resources and activities you must go to the metacourse page. The metacourse will only take the participants of the children course pages, not any of the resources or activities you may have in a child course page.