Hi Michael

A course is pretty much a standalone thing, you wouldn't really tie two courses together in the way you are describing. If you've got two things that need to be tied together like that you should be building them as two sections of the same course.

I think you need to find out if your LMS supports SCORM or not. If it does, you will be able to use Adapt with it and you will not need a back end developer, it should just be a case of uploading a zip file containing the course to the server, though some LMSes do like to make this procedure unnecessarily complex.