I think I read that wrong, I had forgotten this is the section after the mongo store load (I'm didn't really touch much of that code other than to tidy it up a bit).  I'm a bit naive on the XMLModuleStore as we only use the Mongo store on my config, but this code is actually trying to load the course from the file system into the XMLModuleStore.  Is that ever going to be possible to do across multiple nodes?  Is that what using the cache will enable?  If you could point me to some code doing something similar, I'd be happy to replicate/adapt it here.