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In cases where there are multiple active Moodle sites for a single course section, such as with labs or discussion sections attached to a main course, it is possible to connect the two courses, not only linking them, but also pulling the grades from one course into the other. This is done by adding a Subcourse activity to the main course, which adds an item in the grade book, pulling grades from the connected course to the main course. Multiple subcourses (such as several labs) may be added to the same main course. Note that this will only connect grades from the subcourse for students who are in both the main course and the subcourse.
Adding the subcourse
To connect courses, begin by putting your course in Edit mode (top right corner) and locating the place in the course where you wish to add the link/connector to the subcourse. Placing these links towards the top of the course can be helpful in facilitating access to the correlated courses from the main course. Hovering over the horizontal dotted line in the desired location, click on the plus (+) that appears, and then click on Activity or resource. In the pop-up window, scroll down and click on Subcourse.
Add a Subcourse name that will appear on the main page, and if desired, a Description for the link. Next you will need to search for the subcourse name under Referenced course > Fetch grades from. This search uses an exact match, meaning that it will find any course with the exact sequence of letters/words typed as one part of the name. For example, when looking for a Chemistry 125 lab course, Chemistry 125 will match all chemistry 125 courses, including labs, but Chemistry 125 Lab will only match courses with nothing between 125 and Lab, so it would not match Chemistry 125a Lab. Therefore, it is necessary to either go broad (e.g. Chemistry 125) and scroll to find the course, or to use the exact course name (e.g. Chemistry 125a Lab or Chemistry 125a Lab Fall 2025-26).
Once you have chosen the desired subcourse, you'll need to decide under Grades fetching whether you want the grades from that course entered into the main course as Percentual values out of 100, or the Real values (which could be out of 10, 30, 250, etc.).
The next setting is the Subcourse activity link, where you can check the box to immediately Redirect to the referenced course when clicking on the link, or leave it unchecked to send them to a page with links to the course and the course grades. You can also choose whether to Open in a new window or stay in the same window.
Finally, under Appearance, you can choose to Display progress from referenced courses on course page to show the % of the course completed (not usually tracked), or to Display grade from referenced course on the course page to show them their linked grade when viewing the main course page.
When you have selected all the settings, click on Save and return to course to finish adding the subcourse.
Subcourse grades
When you add a subcourse to your main course, you will see a new grade item added to the gradebook. If you add multiple subcourses (say, for several labs), each will have its own item in the gradebook. For grading purposes, if your gradebook is set up with the default "ignore empty grade items," you can simply make sure each of these items carries the same weight in the gradebook, and Moodle will calculate each student's grade using only the specific subcourse in which they are enrolled, and for which a grade appears.