Moodle Course Creation

Download PDF guide for - Creating courses

Courses are organised into categories, each category has a nominated ‘Manager’ who can create courses. If you do not know who this is please contact the IT Services Help Desk: http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/it/helpdesk/

Creating a course

1. From the course category scroll to the bottom of the page and click Add New Course and you will be taken to the course settings page for your new course.
2. In Course full name enter the name of your course.
3. The Course short name can be formatted in 2 ways:

• As a course code which will automatically enrol students attached to the course on myCampus onto the Moodle course.
  (this is the recommended method, see course enrolment documentation)‌
  
• As a name to be used in the breadcrumb trail for easy access to the course page.
  
  
1. All other settings can be ignored at the moment.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes.

Course Creation: Additional settings

This section of documentation serves as a reference and contains information regarding the additional Moodle course settings. This should only be referenced if you are unsure of a particular setting.

Course Category:
Determines which category this course sits under. This setting is restricted as course creators will be limited to the categories they can add courses to.

Visible:
Determines whether the course appears in the enrolled list of courses (for enrolled students and people browsing the category). If this is set to hidden only enrolled staff and Moodle administrators will have access to the course.

Course start date:
Determines the start of the first week for a course set to weekly format. It also determines the earliest date that logs of course activities are available from.

Course ID number:
This can be used to enrol additional cohorts on the course (see course enrolment documentation).

Course summary:
The course summary is displayed in the list of courses. A course search searches course summary text in addition to course names.

Course summary files:
Allows you to attach images which will also be displayed in the course summary.

Format:
The course format determines the layout of the course page. The most common format types are:

• Topics format (default) - The course page is organised into topic sections.
• Weekly format - The course page is organised into weekly sections, with the first week starting on the course start date.

Other formats available are:

• Single activity format - For displaying a single activity or resource (such as a Quiz or SCORM package) on the course page
• Social format - A forum

Number of sections:
This determines the number of Topics or Weeks that are available for you to populate.

Hidden Sections:
This setting determines whether hidden sections are displayed to students in collapsed form or are completely hidden.

• Hidden sections are shown in collapsed form – Students will see the section heading but no the content of the section.
• Hidden sections are completely invisible – Students will not see the section heading or content

Course layout:
Determines whether the whole course is displayed on one page or split over several pages.

• Show all sections on one page (default) – Shows all your course content on one Moodle page.
• Show one section per page – Shows the content of each Topic or Week in a separate page.

Force language:
The Moodle interface is set to English by default.

News items to show:
This determines how many recent items appear in the latest news block on the course page. If set to "0 news items" then the latest news block will not be displayed.

Show gradebook to students:
Determines whether a student can view a list of all their released grades for the course via a link in the course administration block.

Show activity reports:
This setting determines whether a student can view their own activity reports via their profile page. As well as listings of their contributions, such as forum posts or assignment submissions, these reports also include access logs.

Maximum upload size:
This setting determines the largest size of file that can be uploaded to the course. This is limited by the site-wide setting set by an administrator.

Completion tracking:
Completion tracking enables staff to set conditions that can track a student's progress through the course and see which resources and activities they have accessed. You can also make some resources or activities available upon completion of a previous activity, providing a guided progression through the course.

Group mode:
The group mode defined at course level is the default mode for all activities within the course.

• No groups - There are no groups, everyone is part of one big community
• Separate groups - Each group member can only see their own group, others are invisible
• Visible groups - Each group member works in their own group, but can also see other groups

Force group mode:
If group mode is forced, then the course group mode is applied to every activity in the course. Group mode settings in each activity are then ignored.

Default grouping:
If groupings are enabled, a default grouping for course activities and resources may be set.

This setting allows the displayed names for roles (e.g. ‘Staff’ and ‘Student’) used in the course to be changed. Only the displayed name is changed - role permissions are not affected.

 

This Moodle guide was created by LEADS and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.