This article will introduce you to some essential Moodle steps involved in building a course and tips and links pertaining to the same.
Create Categories
Categorize your courses. It is a great way to keep your courses organised. It may not seem to be a crucial step but as your course count started to increase, it is best to have them categorised which will make your site more user-friendly.
The default course category on a new Moodle site is "Miscellaneous" (although this can be renamed)
Click the link below for step by step instruction to create a course category.
https://ecreators.zendesk.com/knowledge/articles/360000412515/en-us?brand_id=2273046
Create Courses
Creating a course involves the following steps. Developing a course within Moodle requires a fair amount of pre-planning.
Make sure you understand what you would like the course to deliver, your audience type and the outcome of the course. Having these in mind will help you to narrow down on the right content and the right way to deliver the content as well.
Create a course to make use of all the Moodle resources and activities.
Click the link below for instructions on how to create courses.
https://ecreators.zendesk.com/knowledge/articles/360000413535/en-us?brand_id=2273046
Naming the Courses
Naming the courses appropriately is a great way to identify the course instantly. Full name is displayed at the top of each page in the course and in the list of courses. Short Name is used in the breadcrumbs at the top of pages inside a course. It will be used in several places where the long name is not appropriate, such as the Navigation block
The goal of giving appropriate naming for the courses is to provide users with instant information to understand the course that they are accessing. This is especially important when you have different versions of the same course as they are intended to target different audience or for various reasons.
Course Formats
A course format refers to the layout of the course.
Choosing the right format will play a major role in helping the users navigate within the course which in turn will keep your users engaged.
Start exploring the course formats that you would like to use. Each format is unique and based on how you would like your course to flow you can choose the format. The four standard course formats available are.
- Weekly Format
- Topics Format
- Social Format
- SCORM Format
You can also find other formats within the Moodle plugins directory.
https://moodle.org/plugins/browse.php?list=category&id=19
Click the link below for instructions on how to edit a course format.
https://ecreators.zendesk.com/knowledge/articles/360000864916/en-us?brand_id=2273046
Including Activities and Resources
Choosing the right activity and resources is very critical as they are the salient entities that allow the LMS to interact with the users and provide the information that needs to be delivered. Depending upon the audience you can choose the activity or resource that will suit the needs.
In Moodle terminology, an Activity, such as Forums or Quizzes, properly means something students can contribute to directly, and is often contrasted to a Resource such as a File or Page, which is presented by the teacher to them. However, the term activity is sometimes for convenience also used to refer to both Activities and Resources as a group.
Examples of activities include quiz, forums, Lesson etc.
Examples of Resources include folder, page, URL etc.
There are 14 different types of activities in the standard Moodle.
- Assignments
- Chat
- Choice
- Database
- Feedback
- Forum
- Glossary
- Lesson
- LTI
- Quiz
- SCORM
- Survey
- Wiki
- Workshop
Additional plugins can be explored using the Moodle plugins directory
Click the link below for instructions on how to add activity or resources to your courses
Add an activity or resources to your course
The settings available differ according to the Activity or the Resource that you are using. Almost all thee activity or resource can be restricted based on standard conditions.
This setting is labelled Restrict access on the settings page for every resource, activity and section in Moodle. Using the Restrict access feature is often referred to as using conditionals in a Moodle course.
Click the link below for further instructions on Restrict Access setup.
Tips.
It can be very time-consuming to add Resources and Activities to a course especially if you think they are going to repeat. You can choose to duplicate an activity within a same course or also import activities from a different course. Below links will give you more information on the same
Adding Blocks
Apart from adding activities and resources you can also customize the way look and feel of the course using Blocks.
Moodle Blocks can provide additional functionality and content to your module which would make the course more user-friendly.
Standard Block available are
- Activities
- Activity results
- Admin bookmarks
- Administration
- Blog menu
- Blog tags
- Calendar
- Comments
- Course completion status
- Course overview
- Course/site summary
- Courses
- Feedback
- Flickr
- Global search
- HTML
- Latest announcements
- Latest badges
- Learning plans
- Logged in user
- Login
- Main menu
- Mentees block
- Navigation
- Network servers
- Online users
- People
- Private files
- Quiz results
- Random glossary entry
- Recent activity
- Recent blog entries
- Recently accessed courses
- Recently accessed items
- Remote RSS feeds
- Search forums
- Section links
- Self-completion
- Social activities
- Starred courses
- Tags
- Timeline
- Upcoming events
- Youtube
There are several other customized blocks available in the Moodle plugins directory.
https://moodle.org/plugins/?q=type:block
Click the link below for further instructions on adding a block to a course.
Enrol Users
After you create your course you will have to enrol the users into the course for them to access it. Moodle allows several enrollment methods
Depending upon which enrolment methods are enabled for the site (by an administrator in Site administration > Plugins > Enrolments > Manage enrol plugins), some or all of the following are available within a course:Manual Enrolment: This enables users to be enrolled manually. Enrol users via the Manual enrolment method1. Self Enrolment: This allows users to enrol themselves into a course, either directly or via an enrolment key ("course password")
How to enrol users via the Self-enrolment method2. Guest Access: This allows those with the guest role to view the contents of a course.
How to enable Guest Access for the Site and allow guest access for courses
3. Cohort Sync: A cohort is a set of users which has been added either to the site as a whole or to a particular category and which can then be made available in a course through the cohort-sync enrolment plugin.
Enrolling users into a course via Cohort Sync
4. Course Metalink: This allows users who are in another course to be automatically enrolled in your course as well.
How to enrol users into a course via Course metalinking
5. Paypal: This allows users to pay for a course. The PayPal enrolment plugin needs to be enabled sitewide by the administrator and the plugin needs to be added to a course by the administrator or a manager.
How to configure Paypal enrolment method
Most of the time the above Enrolment methods would be sufficient but if you have special circumstances chances are high that you may find a relevant enrolment plugin within Moodle plugin directory.
https://moodle.org/plugins/?q=type:enrol
Tips:
Users can be enrolled in bulk by using a CSV file as enrolling users one by one manually can be very tedious sometimes.
Users can also be separated into groups to have separate users. This will be greatly helpful when you want to allocate a particular activity, resource or topic section to just one class or set of users and you don’t want others to see it.
Testing
Last but not least after you finish creating the course and enrolling the user, make sure you test the course as an enrolled student.
Testing as an end-user would be the best way to determine if the course works the way you intended to.
If you have the relevant permissions you can easily log in as one of the enrolled users and check if the course works as it should be for that user.
