You have, say, five modules, and students do not necessarily enrol on all of them. But you would like every student who has enroled on any module to belong to the student common room.Moodle has this really useful feature... the meta course. This is a course administrator's dream, and it just requires the course designer to understand the feature and to consider it from early on in the design process. This is how it works...
It works backwards... it's counter-intuitive (well, it is for me anyway — you may see it differently). The meta course inherits enrolments from its children. Er, when did a parent inherit attributes from their child? But in a funny way it works. Look at the two scenarios below...
You have, say, five modules, and students do not necessarily enrol on all of them. But you would like every student who has enroled on any module to belong to the student common room.
Note that if you try to enrol students on the meta course you can't, you can only enrol them on the child courses.
I'm sometimes asked if students enroled on, say, two child courses are listed twice in the meta course; no, they are only listed once.
We have a live example in Ecological Building and Design: There are five modules and students enrol on them one at a time, usually sequentially; this has a tendency to fragment the learning community; so we have a course homepage on which everyone is automatically enroled by means of this meta-child structure.
You have, say, twelve modules and you want all the students to be enroled on all of them. You want all the students to interact in a common social space to make it all feel like one big course, and you call that the "student common room". It's a bore to have to enrol them thirteen times, and there's the danger that as new people come on and some drop out inconsistencies will creep in.
Note that if you try to enrol students on a module you can't, you can only enrol them in the student common room. That's the power of this model, it prevents errors, omissions and inconsistencies.
We have a live example in International Induction: There are four sections that all the students must do; we have set up a student home page where they enrol and do the stuff like introductions and informal discussion; then we made an image map that is four big buttons which take you to each of the four sections. It's really nice only having to enrol the students once, especially as, being an induction course, there's a constant ebb and flow of participants.