Tutorial: Start setting up your course

1. Focus for this tutorial

In this tutorial we explore:

• How to define the layout of your course;
• How to customise your course sections;
• How blocks work in Moodle and how to add them;
• How to give learners access to 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.

3. Add and edit course content

With Edit mode on, you can add and edit your course content. Here we look at how you can add an individual item, an activity or resource.

Add an item

• At the bottom of the section where you want to add your materials, click Add an activity or resource and then click the item you want to add. (You can always move it to a different location later.)
• Complete the settings form you are presented with and save it. (Explore our courses Moodle Course Content and Moodle Course Activities for more detailed instructions.)

Modify an item

• Click onto the item.
• Click 'Settings' from the activity navigation and make your changes.
• If you want,  you can alert learners to the modifications by ticking 'Send content change notification' before you click to save.
• Save.

The following video explains how to edit your course.

Course editing

To edit the course main page and add content we first enable Edit mode by toggling the icon top right.

We can quickly rename our sections from for example Topic 1 to a name that's relevant to us by clicking the pencil icon, typing

in a new name and pressing Enter.

Clicking the three dots on the right allows us to add or modify the summary of this section.

Then after saving the changes you can see the summary on the course page and note how the name change is reflected in the course index on the left.

We can move sections, so we could move Topic two, which is not yet renamed, up above Topic one which has been renamed to Reading.

To highlight, hide or delete a section, we go to the three dots to the right.

Remember deleting a section also delete any content in that section, but you can get them back again from Course navigation > More.

The recycle bin usually only appears once you've deleted something, depending on your administrator settings.

This course has three topic sections.

We can add a new section by clicking Add topic in the area we want the section, or at the bottom.

Note that if we are using weekly format you can only add a week at the bottom.

Items in our course also have those three dots giving access to useful actions, for example, duplicating an item.

This is useful if you want several versions of, for example, a Page, which you will then edit each with different content.

Course activities and resources may also be moved by drag and drop, either up and down the course page, up and down the course index or from one to the other.

If you prefer, you can click the three dots and move from there.

If we hide an item, for example, Announcements, we see the note ‘hidden from students’.

To view your course as a student would, click the arrow next to your profile top right, click Switch role to.. Select student … and note how the Announcements

have disappeared.

Go back to your user profile, click Return to my normal role and you’ll see the Announcements again.

Enable editing again if needed but if you want to edit the settings or content of an item you can do this by clicking the item, such as our Course rules, and editing there. No need to enable Editing for this.

Click the short name of the course to return to the main page.

Finally, to add content such as Pages, files, assignments, with Edit mode enabled, we click Add an activity or resource.

4. Move items and sections

With Edit mode on, you can add, modify and move teaching materials and course sections.

Move teaching materials

• Click onto an item and drag it to the position you want it to go to, either from the course main page (central area) or from the Course index.
• You can also click on an item in the course main page and drag it to a location in the Course index, if you find that easier. (This is useful when your course has lots of activities or sections).
• You can also click the three dots next to an item, click Move and then decide where to relocate the item.

Move course sections

• Collapse the section, either on the course main page or in the course index.
• Click onto a section and drag it to the position you want it to go to, either from the course main page (central area) or from the course index.
  
• You can also click on a section in the course main page and drag it to a location in the course index, if you find that easier. (This is useful when your course has lots of activities or sections).
  
• You can also click the three dots next to a section, click Move and then decide where to relocate it.

5. Quick check

Test your understanding with this quick check. The grades are not stored, so you can try as often as you like.

Quick Check

6. The icons

With Edit mode on, you will see a pencil icon next to the names of each activity or resource. Click into the name to change it, and press Enter to save your changes.

To the right of each section you will see three dots. Click there to edit the section description.

To the right of each item (activity or resource) you will see three dots. From here you can delete, hide, duplicate the item, along with accessing additional ways to move or edit it.

7. Blocks

• Blocks provide extra information on the side of your course.
• You can add blocks by enabling Edit mode top right, opening the Block drawer and then clicking to Add a block.
• Think carefully before you add blocks to ensure they are useful.
• Teachers can add and remove blocks with the editing turned on. Admins can make some blocks "sticky" so they display throughout the site. These cannot be removed by teachers.
• Some blocks, such as Text blocks may be added more than once in a course.

 The following video explains what blocks are.

What are blocks?

As a teacher you can add blocks to the side of your main learning area.

In this course using the standard Boost theme, the blocks are on the right

Blocks are elements which add extra information or learning content to your course.In our teacher Sam's new course, there are no blocks at the moment but she can add some by enabling

Edit mode top right, then expanding the block drawer and clicking Add a block.

Here she can choose useful blocks to add to the course.

Which blocks are available depends on the administrator’s settings.

Sam adds a Search forums block and an Online users block.

Once added, blocks may be hidden or deleted by clicking the icon.

They may also be moved around either with the crosshairs icon by clicking and holding the crosshairs icon and selecting a location to move them to - or by simply dragging and dropping.

Here for example Sam is dragging the Online users block underneath the Search forums block.

8. Text block

• The Text block provides you with the text editor so you can add text, links, images, media and even (with care) embedded code to the block to create truly customised blocks.
• You can add more than one Text block to your course page.

 The following video explains how to use the Text block. 

The Text block

A Text block is a customisable block allowing you to add images, text, links or even embedded code or widgets to blocks at the side of your course.

You don't need to understand any code to use it.

You can add more than one Text block, as you see here, where we have for instance a block introducing the course teacher and an image of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

To add a block, we enable Edit mode and then from the Block drawer click Add block and choose the block we want - here - Text block.

Let's add an image of the course teacher with a short message.

So, when the block is added we need to configure the new text block by clicking the icon.

We give it a title - I'm going to call it Bonjour! and then in the content we add the image we want.

Teacher Sam has her image on the desktop so simply needs to drag it in.

Moodle's Atto editor allows you to drag and drop an image in We then click on it to give it a description.

Underneath the image we can add text, including making a link and then when we click Save, the Text block displays in the Block drawer.

9. Give learners course access

Note: Giving learners course access is an important aspect of course set up but we advise you to complete the courses Add content to your Moodle course and Add activities to your Moodle course before enrolling learners. An empty course is not very motivating ;)

• How learners access your course depends on the policies of your institution and Moodle administrator.
• As a teacher you might be able to give learners access yourself, or this might be done by the admin.
• Click the Participants link from the Course navigation to see who is already in your course and then click Enrol users to see who is already in your course and to manually enrol others (if allowed).
• Click the Participants link and then Enrolment methods to explore other ways of giving learners access, for example Self-enrolment.

Giving learners course access

There are a number of ways in which your learners can access your course, for example your administrator might enrol them for you or they might be automatically enrolled from outside, or they might be able to create their own accounts on the Moodle site and then enrol themselves into your course.

Enrolment means how students get into your course whereas Authentication means how they get onto a Moodle site, which we do not look at here.

In this video we look at how you the teacher can manually add students to your course and how you can find out the other ways in which they can access your course.

If we click Participants from Course navigation, we see any participants already enrolled in the course and if there are a lot we and we can search and filter with several options.

If allowed, teachers can click the Enrol users button to manually add a student.

Note that as a course teacher you can't add other editing teachers unless allowed by admin.

From the dropdown, by selecting Enrolment methods we can see the different ways that they're able to access or be enrolled into a course.

The first one we see is called Manual enrolments.

This means that students can be enrolled into the course by the teacher.

Guest access here has its eye icon closed so that means that currently no guests can look at this course, but the teacher can enable it by clicking the icon.

Self-enrolment means that users can enrol themselves by clicking a button if we enable it by opening the eye.

If the admin has allowed other enrolment methods, you can access them from the dropdown.

Let's explore the options for self-enrolment by clicking the icon.

Here you can set a password or enrolment key and you can also amongst other options set a limit on the number of learners who can join the course .

Let’s enable self enrolment and follow student Barbara as she accesses the course.

She sees the Enrol button but first she has to enter the enrolment key - she does this and now can enrol in the course.

10. Quick check

Test your understanding with this quick check. The grades are not stored, so you can try as often as you like.

Quick Check