 My name is Inda Johnson and I am the Director of Educational Technology at the Medical University of South Carolina. This is in Charleston, South Carolina, and I am with the College of Medicine. That's important because we are a health sciences center so we have six different colleges in different healthcare fields, so dentistry, nursing, all of that. So I, opposite of what we just heard, am in the undergraduate medical education arena which would be students who are trying to get a medical degree. So one of the things that, a challenge for me, which I'll talk about a little bit more after I kind of say a few things about a metacourse, was that I had to come up with a creative way to use our Moodle instance and based on our curriculum. So I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a second. So a metacourse, it was funny, I was, when I was getting this together I was thinking about what I, how I define it, then looking up how others define it. And so this is how it's defined. So a course that has a linked course in it or a parent course that inherits a child course or a course shell that brings in enrollments from other courses. It's on my campus, I think I probably utilize this more than anybody, but I'll explain why, again in a minute, why I had to use it so often, why I do use it so often. So child courses are brought into a metacourse. So you say, you set up something and say you allow it to be a metacourse. You bring in other courses into that course. That means all the enrollments that come with that course come in. If you want to change the enrollments, you can change them in the child course. And then you can enroll multiple child courses into one metacourse. That's where it came to be a good thing for me. So I faced the problem of in the first two years of medical school, we have an integrated curriculum, which means that they have no longer have siloed courses. They learn all of their systems based stuff in one large way. So although they get reported out for different grades at the end of a semester or fall and spring, so it ends up being eight. It's really a longitudinal learning curriculum for them. And so I couldn't use four different Moodle courses because I would completely take away the point of what we're trying to do. So I had to have one large course, which was fine except I also needed our lecture capture software to be divided up because they have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of lectures. So we didn't want it all to be jumbled together. So I still needed to have separate folders in the lecture capture software, but I needed all in one course. But I couldn't do that just enrolling them all in one course. So metacourse is fixed that for me. So what I did in essence is for the first and second years is that I created a large course shell, let's say it's called year one. And then in year one I pulled the enrollments from the other four, from the four courses that they are technically enrolled in through our enrollment services. So when I did that, they all got enrolled into my big course. They could see everything I had listed in the big course. But then they got individual folders because of our integration with our lecture capture software. They got individual folders in the lecture capture software. So that was clear. So it's not hundreds of lectures in one spot for them. But they got everything in one large course. So this helped me with point, the second point here, which is we wanted to keep the same material and this huge course, but kind of switch our enrollments in and out. Of course we upgrade update material, but we didn't want to keep creating courses. The other issue that came up for me was in the third and fourth years when they go into their clinical years, they are on two week, three week, four week and six week rotations. So the problem was I didn't want to have to keep creating a course or every six weeks because through the way our enrollment service was made, that's how it works really. They spit out a course every six weeks because that's how it's based on the dates. So what we did for that or what I did for that is created one course shell that we just changed the enrollments every six weeks. So the child course has changed. So like yesterday, one block ended and another one began. So you just take out that child course and add in the new child course. This way you can keep all of your information and it may change. I mean a lot of people have different rotations, obviously different dates and things, so that might change within your course. But the general information doesn't have to change or if you have grading policies, things like that that everybody needs to see, you can keep that. The other nice thing about this is the third point here is that you can use it to collaborate between multiple courses with multiple enrollments. So we're a health sciences center that has, like I said, six different colleges. And we have really big on interprofessional education. So one of the things that we do is all of first year students and all of the colleges, this would be dentistry, medicine, nursing, all of those health professions, they have to take a interprofessional course in their first year where they have to work on a team-based project, a doctor, a nurse, everybody, all that. So we can pull their enrollments all into this one interprofessional course, which is a big deal for us because everybody is like the master of their own category. So I'm only the master of college of medicine category and then the person for nursing is the master of theirs. But for the interprofessional course, we can have the person who runs that pull in these child courses into the meta course so then they can do it that way. So that's part of why I use them so heavily, like I said. Multiple sessions of a course because we are on rotation, heavy rotation, every three weeks, every four weeks, every six weeks. We could use the same material in the course but just change the enrollments. We've also been a little creative with other things. So if rotation one obviously would have different dates, then maybe rotation two. So we're just maybe using groups. We could set that to where they could see the group that came in. If we kept everybody in there, the group that came in could see just rotation two. Group one could see rotation one. Or if we took them out completely, we could just hide whatever we don't want them to see. It just depends on the specialty. Some specialties want to keep the students enrolled the whole time that they're in medical school. Some specialties do not. They want them out. So it just depends on the needs. I would say that this was when we first went to the system we have. But I think we have a pretty unique instance. We actually are hosted by Jules Swarth Moodle Rooms. But the fact that everybody's on the same instance and we're all different colleges was really, it's really a strange setup. So it was a really very difficult thing at first, because it was like, how are we going to make this work? But the metacourses has been the savior to this. And originally back, I think, when we were on the very beginning on 1.9, I think we weren't able to add the manual enrollments, I don't believe. But I know we can now, which makes it great so that we can, if somebody's not enrolled in a child course, I don't necessarily have to go to the child course. I can enroll them in the metacourse. I can also delete them there, which I couldn't do that before. Before, if they were a metacourse, you could only enroll people into the child course. Now you can do both. So it makes it very helpful. So this is what it looks like. For those of you that have never seen a metacourse. So this is the big course. And in here, I have just pulled in onto that choose option. If you've ever noticed it has a course meta link, you choose that. And then it gives you an option of courses to choose from, depending upon what courses are available to you. So this is how it actually looks for a first year medical student. Of course, they don't know this. They don't see any of this. This is all in the back end. And like I said, one of the reasons that I had to do this, too, because we could have just used one of these courses, because they were enrolled in four, because they get a grade. But because of the integration with our lecture capture software, I needed them to have these four folders. Otherwise, like I said, they would have had literally 300 or 400 lectures recorded in one folder. And they wouldn't have had any way to get through it. So now they just see one Moodle course. And then when they go into their lecture capture software, they see four separate folders. So that's basically it. Just that's the setup. And that's how it worked for us. One other thing I didn't really talk about too much was the start and end dates. We have an integration through our system to where the courses are all generated through our enrollment services. But we have not put end dates on our courses. They only put start dates. I don't really know why, but for some reason, they've done that. So that's the other thing. It's not like we have it where the courses, from here to here, it opens and closes. It kind of stays open. So this also helps with that. So if I want to leave the courses in there and leave the people in there, they can be in there for as long as we say. Or when I move them out, it doesn't matter, because all of the material is housed in a course shell that's separate. Now, a few of the drawbacks to this are if you have any integration where your systems talk, which ours do, but we don't use it this way, where if you can send grades back to your enrollment services from your Moodle course, that you can't do through the MetaCourse, the way I have it set up. If I had it in a separate course, I could do that. But I can't do that. The other thing that is a current work in progress is that our mobile app doesn't support the MetaCourse right now. So for our students, our mobile app, they see the course shells, but there's nothing in there. So that's something that they're working on. That's partly because of the authentication that we use. So that's a work in progress also. But once those things are kind of ironed out, we found a lot of uses for this with our residency programs. Like I said, it was interprofessional collaboration. It's just a nice way to have a lot of different people collaborate in one space. And you don't have to change your information as often. Or, well, every six weeks, you wouldn't have to. Is there any questions? So how do you use the SOAP course plug-in to hold the grades back down from when the child went into the MetaCourse? I have not. Have you used that? Yeah. You can see the variation. Yeah. So you can actually, as I've said, I'll say that the grade from the shared course is pulled back at the activity into the main course. Into the main course. It means that your main course may be then called also MetaCourse. Sure. And have just that main course with all the grades. So it becomes like a curriculum itself. Yeah. That's very interesting. Yeah. It's a deployment-based thing. Yeah. It sounds like it. Yeah, definitely. Does pulling, so when the course ends, and you attach the child to the course from the parent to the course, does that sort of reset all the parent to the course, for example, the forums or resources? So only what's tied to the user, so it doesn't reset the forums or anything, but it does take out the user's information. Now, one thing, though, that was a little quirky before is it was keeping attempts. You know how, if you look at quiz attempts, anybody who's ever done it, that was still in there. So when I reset courses, if we want that data out of there, like at the end of the year, we'll reset all of that. But it takes away. Now, the other thing, when they are taken out, and let's say I put them back in, and I want to restore their grades, it will restore their grades just fine, but it won't restore any files associated with them, which has come back around when people have not downloaded files they should have kept before we unenrolled them. And that's like best practices, because we've had been burned with that, needing a file that we can't find now. So, and you, right, and I could possibly have multiple. Yeah, so maybe in any course, you would have the activity that single activity would appear as a native activity in the shell. In the shell or something. Yeah, that might be interesting. Yeah, it actually would hit on the issue that we had in the clinical years, which was the changing of the enrollment and the time period, changing so fast, they didn't want to have to keep restoring or importing and making another course. That would be interesting. So, in the clinical patch-up course from the lab course, the grades of the students are going to have? Yes. And you said some of the files would be stored. Would that get restored? Right. Would they be able to keep a history of what happened to the students through their semester in order for them to prove their dedication? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So that is one thing that we do, because like I said, now when it restored, it will restore their grade, but not necessarily any files. But we keep their, you know, we download any, if they are attaching any files, like write-ups or anything like that, download them and keep them locally. Just because we've had people come back with grade grievances or anything like that, definitely. So we have them. Because of how many people we have at the university and how many students we have, we don't want to keep those courses with all those files and all that storage in our instance. So we just download them and keep them that way. And so if anybody ever had an issue, we could go back. But in the beginning, when people were not doing that very well, we had issues with that. And we could recover a few we could recover. And the old version and the newer version, there's no way to find them. Or we haven't found them. Yes. As far as the user experience covers, students ever get confused about what those were? No. They actually don't even know that it's set up this way. All I tell them in orientation is that the mobile app won't work for them because of the way I have the core set up. But they actually don't see the shells. They're hidden to them. And they just see the main course. So on their Moodle page, they just see College of Medicine year one. And then when they go in it, they see all the information. Because of the way the curriculum is integrated, everything is by blocks and by system. So it's all in one. So it's not like siloed courses. So they don't see it that way. Now in the clinical years, it's the same thing. They could be on their family medicine rotation. And they just see the big family medicine course. They don't know that they had a section. Because there's eight sections in one semester. They don't even know that. But it was really helpful for our, like I said, for the folders and our lecture capture software. Because that's all integrated. And for them, if they were to record into the big course, it would have just been this long list of lectures that they would have never been able to get there. So that's helped. This course is for you. Hm? This section is for some, yes, for some courses we do. The courses, there are some specialties that want the students to stay in the whole entire time, I guess, because it's relevant to everything else they're doing. And they don't. They just, you know, if you're off that rotation, obviously you know that the dates that are there are not for you. Some of our mandatory courses, like our internal medicine and surgery, they do use force groups for certain rotations, you know. So only so many people are seeing, you know, a rotation to or whatever. Also, if we have any residents that are teaching within the course, usually there's an area that's just for them. So we use it that way. Any other questions? Yes. Do you still challenge most of the faculty to teach you? Do you have an honor of teachers that you know they don't guide you today? Yes. Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know if you guys heard what he said. So he asked about different faculty being able to edit in the course. That's very true. So no, the course is centrally managed more or less. We have a course coordinators. There's two of them that are staff people that usually are doing most of the updating. But there are usually two or three faculty members that also are given editing privileges to be able to edit like their quiz questions and things like that. But most of it because of how large our curriculum is it's really robust. If we had two or three or four people editing at one time, it would be, you know, it would be a mess. That is something we had to do is kind of take it centrally, control it centrally, which you would have to do because otherwise it would be too many different people changing things. What are the class size? So for a first year medical class for us is 180 students. And then there's probably 20 core faculty, but a lot more. Everybody, though they're enrolled as non-editing teachers, so they can, you know, see everything and grade, but they can't do anything, edit anything. Yes. How do teachers see only their group where they can see the other, okay? They can see all of them. Well, it depends on the big, in the big course they can see all of them. But if we have some sub-courses and in the sub-courses they're grouped out and they only see, like for grading purposes they only see their 10 students. So they can grade in a small group fashion so they don't have to see everybody. So the big course they have to be seeing through the students or through the grades? Yes, but in the big course, the way that our curriculum is, nobody is grading just like a small subset of students. That would be, we have a couple of different courses that I'll tie in and that would be, they're like patient groups where there's like 10 students in a group and then they are put in groups and they grade them that way. But in the whole, they would just, they just grade all the students, you know, there might be three or four graders in different assignments and they grade everybody. So I would see everybody. Okay, great, thank you.