Using Moodle : Organisation and layout

There are three main sections:

Heading area:

Gives the course you are working on and the 'Turn editing on/off' button. With Editing off (the default when you first arrive here) the screen looks somewhat like a student would see. Most Moodle functions are only available when Turn editing on has been clicked.

Courses can be organised on a weekly, topic or forum format. [link to when to use different formats] [link to how to set course format].

Weekly Outline:

This displays each week in a separate chunk enabling the instructor to present the syllabus to the student in a visual manner [link to How To : display syllabus]

The icons at the side of each weekly chunk allows lots of flexibility in how the weeks are displayed.

	Show only this week. All the others are hidden
	Hide this week from view
	Move this week up one place on the screen
	Move this week down one palce on the screen

Any number of Moodle 'activities' can be added to each week using the Add pulldown menu.

Clicking on the activity allows the instructor to grade all submissions.

Blocks :

Blocks are informational units that can be moved around the screen to create a customised look you favour. You can hide or remove blocks that seem superfluous to your course.

Activities

The teacher can see at a glance all the different activities that he/she has assigned. Clicking on the activity allows it to be graded.
The student sees the same contents (unless the block is hidden) and this is where they can see all their course activities together in one place and work on them.

 

Administration

Turn editing on	Use this link or the button in the heading to switch on editing the Weekly outline and contents of other blocks. With editing off the display looks like what the student will see.
Settings...	Change the course settings (see How To : Create Course)
Teachers...	Assign a teacher to the course and change her role to teaching Assistant or Tutor (you decide what to call the role). See How To : Groups & Tutors and How To : Course Sections
Students...	Manually enrol or unenrol individual students (see How To : Create course)
Backup...	Save a course or parts of it with or without student data. This is independent of ECS systems backups.
Restore...	Use this to upload a saved course and present it again in a following semester.
Scales...	Define custom non-numeric grading scale such as "utter rubbish, naff, alright, well good, dead brill"
Grades...	View and change all grades for all activities for all students.
Logs...	Track what's been happening on your Moodle site.
Files...	You can organise all your files that you use on the course here. Create folders, move files about, unzip zipped archives. Very useful for managing a course from multiple machines (eg desktop & portable). See How To : Resources.
Help...	General help. Specific help is available for nearly all available options.
Teacher forum...	Viewable only by teachers in your course. Useful for making notes to yourself or to T.As or coordinating a team taught course in sections.

 

Block Display

Blocks not shown can be displayed using the Add pulldown. Blocks that are deleted are returned to this list.

 

Calendar

The calendar shows four different kinds of events:

1. Global events - posted by the system administrator
2. Group events - deadlines for your student groups
3. Course events - all Moodle activities with a due date are shown
4. User events - for personal happenings

Clicking on any of the links hides the category of events from the student.
To set an event, click on the month shown [link]

 

Controlling blocks

The arrows allow you to arrange the blocks in any position on the screen. The cross deletes the block (you can use the Block: Add pulldown to get it back again), and the 'eye' hides the block.

 

Online Users

shows who is currently online.

 

People

Participants is informational only - shows details of all the participants in your course. To add or remove students use the setting in the Administrative block. [link].
Groups is where you can create groups within a course and add/remove students and instructors [link]
Edit profile is where you modify your personal Moodle profile.

 

Recent Activity

The Recent activity block shows the activities that you have newly added to your course (Course updates) and other things such as Forum posts and Glossary entries. This is a useful management tool for tracking changes that you have made. Note that this also displays student submissions which all class members can see.

 

Upcoming Events

Upcoming Events shows activities such as assignments that have close due dates.

 

Hiding assignments or other activities

This allows the instructor to create an assignment and work on it before releasing it to student view. Make sure that you give students sufficient time to complete it though.

Hiding Weeks

Similarly, you can work on the course several weeks ahead and just display the week section when you are ready. Note that all the activities are hidden within this week.

Hiding Blocks

You may decide that you don't want students to see Recent activity for example, but you want it there to check on progress. Hiding the block allows you to display it when you need to.