"Course Home" question solved (sort of)

I've figured out why students see errors when they enter a course and see the Course Home page, even when instructors don't have a problem seeing the Course Home page. This discovery will affect both how we clean up Bb7 masters before migration, and how restored courses will need to be cleaned up after the migration.

ISSUE:
This Course Home page is built on the Module tool, a tool that is new in Bb9. Right now at the system (admin) level this tool is (or should be) enabled in all courses. It IS enabled in courses created fresh within Bb9. Despite this system-level setting, the Module tool becomes unavailable in a course when a course that originated in Bb7 is either restored or imported into Bb9. This setting loss causes two issues: 1) the instructor can see the Course Home page and thinks it's working fine, but students see the error; and 2) if the course menu doesn't contain a Course Home item by default, there's no way to add one. Nice!

[Side note: it's not just the Module tool that reverts to unavailable within the course despite the system level setting; this happens with any new tool or content type that didn't have a precursor in Bb7, including blogs, wikis, journals, image, video, YouTube Video, etc.]

RESOLUTION:
There is a fix but it's very manual and not very pretty:

1. Enter the affected course in Bb9.
2. In the Control Panel, click Customization > Tool Availability.
3. Click to select the checkbox for the Module tool, and click Submit to save.
4. In the course menu, click the Plus button, then click Create New Module Page.
5. Name the new page Course Home.
6. Be sure to select Available to Users.
7. Click Submit to add the page.
8. Use the drag handle to move the Course Home menu link to the top of the menu.
9. Now click the Course Home menu link.
10. On the Course Home page, click the Edit button (the down arrow) and select Add Course Banner.
11. Add the course banner and click Submit to save.
12. On the Course Home page, click the Add Course Module button.
    NOTE: when you create a Course Home page this way, by default users (students) cannot customize their personal view of the Course Home page. This is good - I argue we don't want students to customize this page.
13. Click the check boxes for the modules you want to add to the page. We can discuss, but I propose the Course Home page should contain the following modules:
    - Alerts
    - My Announcements
    - Needs Attention
    - What's New
14. To add the selected modules to the Course Home page, click Submit to save.

PHEW. That's a lot of steps. The good news is that we understand the problem and know one way to fix it. (Paying a contractor anyone?!?)

My research has found this building block that may allow us to re-enable the Module Tool and set the Course Home page in bulk. I've asked our LMS admin if he can install it. If not, this will be an important cleanup task on the far side of the master migration.