Course Merge Helper

Maintained by Charles Fulton, Andrew Zito
This local module allows teachers to create a new course shell from existing courses using the Course Meta Link enrollment method.
Free
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Supports Moodle 3.1-5.2 See all versions
Latest release: 5 years ago
Installations: 152
Downloads (last 90 days): 54
Frankenstyle name: local_course_merge
Local plugins

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Charles Fulton
"Hide child courses" sets the visibility of the source courses to hidden, instead of visible.
Robin Leung
What does "Hide child courses" actually do? Does it mean only that the course is in a hidden state?
Charles Fulton
Thanks everyone, again, for the helpful feedback. I've released a new version which I hope makes it clearer that this plugin creates shells, and I've changed the default permissions model.
David Mudrák

Thanks Charles for sharing the plugin with the community, and thanks Mike for providing the detailed peer-review. I agree with Mike - the name of the plugin kind of suggests that the courses will be actually merged into a single one in terms of activities. So it can be the name that is misleading here. But I also see the reasoning that this can be used in a way that the final product looks and feels like a single unit to the student. Fair enough.

I am happy to approve this plugin now. You are cleared to land, welcome to the Plugins directory.

p.s. I realised this plugin could play well together with the Subcourse module.

Charles Fulton
That's correct; it just creates shells. Mike, thanks for all this feedback. I'll add explicit checks for the meta link method and change the permissions handling. I'll also work on the description to make it more explicit what it does.
Mike Churchward
Additional comment to above... It looks like the "Course meta link" enrolment plugin must be enabled for the users to be enrolled in the new, merged course. When I enabled that plugin, I could see that there were enrolments from all three merged courses into the new course. You may want to have your code check for that enrolment plugin being present and enabled, and provide appropriate error messages if it is not.
But, there were still no activities from the merged courses. I'm guessing that is correct, and that this plugin is only intended to help create a new course shell with the merged courses' enrollments. Is that correct? It may be best to specify that in the description.
Thanks again.
Charles Fulton
The intention of this plugin is to streamline the creating of a metacourse while preserving the enrollment structure in the child courses. It *should* have brought the enrollments over. Did you have course meta links enabled in your testing environment?
Mike Churchward
Hi. I am reviewing your submission on behalf of the Plugins Guardians. The code is well written, and passes all Travis CI checks. Well done! And I see you have included Behat tests as well. That is very helpful.
One initial concern I have is with the local capability that allows users to gain course creation permissions even if the Moodle site has prevented those users from having those permissions. I see that you have it as a configuration item - whether to allow the plugin to override that capability or not. So that may be enough. I wonder if it would be better to default that capability to use Moodle's standard way rather than the other way around? That way, administrators would have to explicitly know that they had done this.
I may be misunderstanding what this does. I used it to merge three courses together, each with activities and enrolments. When the new course was created, it didn't have any of the other courses' activities nor enrolments. It just seemed to create a new course as an empty shell. Am I doing something wrong?