Tutorial: Start exploring Moodle

5. What is a course?

• A 'course' can be a simple page with documents for one teacher and one class, or a complex page with many different activities shared by teachers and several classes.
• It can be always available or have start and end dates, and learners can access it in a number of ways, such as enrolling themselves, being enrolled by their teacher, or by the Moodle administrator.
• A course can display its materials in a number of ways or 'formats', for example in weekly sections or (named) topic sections. You can show all the sections at once or just reveal one at a time.
• You can also add elements known as 'blocks' to the right of the course central area to display more useful information. 

 The following video explains what a course is.

What is a course?

A course in Moodle is basically a space on the Moodle site where one or more teachers can add learning resources and activities for their students.

What your course might look like as a teacher will depend partly on the chosen theme and settings of your administrator.

In the latest version of Moodle with the latest Boost theme you can expect to see a collapsible course index on the left with links to the course sections and any activities, and an expandable block drawer on the right which may have extra information or resources in blocks.

The main content area here is where the actual teaching and learning resources will be added.

In Sam's practice course they are numbered topics which can be renamed, but if we look at a different course on a different Moodle site you can see that these are divided into weekly sections and there are some blocks on the right.

In another video we will look at the use of these blocks.

In order to add learning resources, you need to have editing enabled and on and you do this by toggling the edit icon top right.

There is an Announcements forum here and if I wish to move it into a different section, I simply drag and drop..

If you aren't able to move by dragging and dropping, then ask your administrator for advice.

In order to add files documents or activities for your students, you need to click the link

Add an activity or resource in the section where you'd like them to appear.

It doesn't matter if you choose the wrong section by mistake because it's always possible to move them afterwards.

When you click Add an activity or resource, this displays Moodle's Activity chooser which then allows you to choose what you would like to add, and we'll look at this in a separate video.