Tutorial: Start setting up your course
2. Lay out your course
As a teacher you can make changes to your course if allowed by your admin. From the Course navigation, click 'Settings'. You can, for example...
- Change your course name and the coloured course image.
- Set start and end dates. These dates affect whether the course shows in the Future or Past sections of the Dashboard course overview.
- Set your course up in weekly sections or numbered topics (which you can rename).
- Decide whether you want the completion requirements of activities to display on the course page or only when clicking the activity.
- Decide whether you want to show due dates for activities.
If your course involves mainly discussion you can use the Social format. If you use SCORM packages for your course instead of Moodle activities you can select the Single activity course format.
If you prefer to call your students by a different name (such as 'learner') or you would rather be a 'facilitator' instead of a teacher then these can be changed in the course settings also.
You can always go back and change any settings if needed.
The following video explains how to lay out your course.
Video transcript:
Course layout
As a teacher you have a lot of control over how your course appears to your students.
For example, if your organisation allows, you can change the full name of the course which is in large here, and the short name
of the course, which appears here.
You can also change the format, how your resources and activities are displayed.
This course is in numbered topics for instance, which can be renamed, as we'll see later.
Many of the changes you can make can be done from Settings in Course navigation.
This takes you to the setup screen of your course where you can change if you need to its full name and its short name and again,
only if allowed by your organisation, the category in which it appears . You can hide
it until you're ready and set course dates – although note that the end date will not
prevent students from accessing the course.
You can also add a description of your course for students who are not yet enrolled and if you wish you can upload a course image
which will show on the My courses page.
If we click Course format, this is where we can choose how we'd like the resources to be displayed.
Topics gives us numbered topic sections and we can choose a number of sections.
Here we can also select to have Weekly format where the sections are named as weeks.
Social format which is basically one big message
board for discussions.
Or single activity format, which would allow you to add just one particular item such as a SCORM package or a quiz.
Appearance will allow you to decide how many news items you want to show in the Announcements forum.
If you set it to 0 you can then delete the Announcements forum if you don't think it will be useful to you.
Think about whether you want to show activity dates on the main course page.
They will always show within each activity.
Completion tracking, if enabled will show students what they must do to complete items and will keep a record of what they have done.
These conditions will always show within each activity but you can choose whether or not to display them on the course page as well.
Options can be explored by clicking on them and expanding them, for instance if we click and expand Role renaming - if you don't want to call your students students but you want a different name - learners for instance - then
you can change the name here and that will appear just in your course.
You can also tag your course to help new students search for it.
If we now click to save, then in the next video we will turn on the editing and look at the changes we can make to a course, such as how to rename those sections.