Moodle 2.8: Course Settings

Channell C. Walker

A Moodle course is an online environment where students can learn about a topic either through an instructor-led or a self-paced model. When building your own course, you should consider not only the content, but activities to engage and assess students. Having a plan for your course before filling out the initial course settings will help you choose the best settings to suit your teaching style.

Access the Edit Menu

  1. Login with your NetID and password at moodle.rutgers.edu
  2. Go to the course you would like to edit.
  3. In the administration block, click on the “Edit Settings” link. Here you can edit the details of your course.

General

  1. As an instructor, you will not be able to change certain details of your course because they are set up automatically. These are:

    • Course Full Name
    • Course Short Name
    • Course ID Number
  2. You can edit the course’s visibility or when the course can be seen by students and be found in a search. Just choose Show or Hide from the drop-down menu.
  3. You can also input the course’s start and end date.
  4. Start Date: Input the course start date by day/month/year or select the date from the calendar icon. The time is automatically set to midnight, but you can change it if you would like.
  5. Close Date: First, check the enable box. Then input the close date by day/month/year or select the date using the calendar icon.

Description

  1. The course description/summary is optional, but if you would like to give students an idea of what the course is about you can copy and paste the course summary from the syllabus or upload a document file using the Course summary files box.
    • To use the Course summary files box: either drag the document file from your desktop or folder and drop it on top of the blue arrow.

Course Format

  1. Format: Changing the course format changes the way the weeks/sections are displayed on the course page. Choose the layout that best supports your content.

    1. Weekly Format: Shows your course using dates. The titles can be customized to be a topic title or a weekly title such as, Week 1: Audio Intelligence.
    2. Topics Format: Shows your course by topics not dates. The titles can be customized to be a topic title or a weekly title such as, Week 1: Audio Intelligence.
    3. Single Activity Format: Shows your course one activity at a time. There is a drop-down menu where you can jump to different activities in the course.
    4. Social Format: Shows your course as a discussion forum. No activities or course content.
    5. Grid Format: Displays the sections as thumbnails as a grid gallery.
    6. Collapsed Topics: Displays the sections as drop-down menus.
  2. Hidden Sections: This setting lets you show students the hidden sections as collapsed topics or choose to make the hidden sections completely invisible to students.
  3. Course Layout: This setting lets you choose between having all the sections displayed on one page or split over multiple pages.

Appearance

This section can be left at the default settings because they fit the average course.

  1. Force Language: Do not force language. It is set at English by default.
  2. Number of Announcements: You can change the number of announcements if you like. This is for the announcements forum created in the Getting Started section.
  3. Show Gradebook to Students: If you are using the gradebook feature then keep the gradebook visible to students. If you choose to use your own gradebook tool then make the gradebook invisible.
  4. Show Activity Reports: The activity reports show what students have done in the course.

Files and Uploads

  1. Maximum Upload Size: The default setting for this is 100MB which was the limit in previous versions. You can set this higher, up to 1GB.

Groups

  1. Group Mode: This setting allows students to either see just members of their own group (Separate Groups) or see members of the other groups.
  2. Force Group Mode: This is not recommended unless you want students to automatically be sorted into groups AND use these groups for every activity. If you only have one or two group assignments or want students to be in different groups throughout the semester then you want to set up those groups later.
  3. Default Grouping: This is also not recommended unless you want students to be automatically placed in a particular grouping. If so, you need to create the grouping first and then choose that grouping in this section.


Role Renaming

  1. You can leave this section at the default settings.
  2. OR you can assign custom names to the default roles. For example, if you want the teacher role to be labeled Guide and students to be participants, then you can rename those roles here.

Tags

  1. Tags are keywords used to help find your course in a search engine. If someone needs to find your course and cannot remember the name of it, then using keywords closely related to the course subject will help narrow down the options. This is, of course, optional.

When you have completed all your edits, click on the “Save and Display” button to return to the course main page.

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