Moodle Help Guide

The format of your course determines some of the look and organizational options of the main page of your course.

With the upgrade to Moodle 4, your course will now by default be organized by Topics. Previously, we have created your courses using the Flexible Section format as a starting point, because this format offered our faculty a lot of organizational flexibility. Unfortunately, this course format is no longer compatible with Moodle. All your content has been retained, you can still label each section with your preferred wording, and you can still move your materials around as needed. You may find, however, that managing course content at the week, unit, or section level (depending on how you've described the different components of your Moodle site in the past) has different options than what you are used to!

Course formats now available in Moodle are: Topics, Weeks, Single Activity, Social, and Collapsed Topics. If you would like to explore these formats with a member of the Ed Tech team, please don't hesitate to make an appointment.

• Weekly Format: Your course will automatically have a section for each week of the term with the dates listed. Relevant readings, assignments, etc. can be placed together within each week's section. To change the section titles, click on the three vertical dots [] to the right of the title and click “Edit settings.”
• Topics Format: offers more flexibility about how to group your materials. You can group them by theme or topic, or group them by type of activity (readings, forums, assignments, etc.) No matter which way you choose to organize your course, make sure you make it easy for students to relate the different modules of the course to the overall schedule for the term. To change the section titles, click on the three vertical dots to the right of the title and click “Edit topic.”
• Single Activity Format and Social Format appear in the list, but they're very specialized and we do not recommend them for use with regular curricular Moodle courses.
• Collapsed Topics Format: You can organize course information into topics, and those topics will appear as closed sections until you or students click to open them.

No matter which format you use, you can re-title the sections by clicking on the three vertical dots to the right of the current title when editing is turned on.

To change which format your course is using, follow these instructions:

1. Click on "Settings" tab at the top of the page.
2. Scroll down to and click on the "Course Format" section.  In the list of options that appears, find and click on the "Format" drop-down menu to select the course format that you'd like.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click "Save and display"

Moving Items: To move any item in your course, first turn on editing via the “Edit Mode” toggle in the upper right corner, and then hover over the desired item. Use the “Move” cursor [] to drag and drop it to the correct location. Alternatively, items may be moved using the “Move” cursor to the right of a title within the “Course Index” panel that appears on the left hand side of the course when in editing mode.

Renaming Items: To rename an item, first turn on editing using the “Edit mode” toggle in the right hand corner, and use the pencil item to the right of the title of the item to rename it. You may occasionally have to explicitly save your changes, depending on what you are editing.

Hiding Items: To hide an item, first turn on editing using “Edit mode” toggle in the right hand corner. Click on the three vertical dots to the right of the title of the item, and choose "Availability" from the dropdown menu. You will have the option to either “Hide [the item] on course page,” which makes the item unavailable to students, or “Make [the item] available but don’t show on course page,” which requires sending a link to the associated item to students to render it available. If these settings are selected, the availability status of an item appears in a gray box beneath the item’s title when in editing mode. This status can be changed by clicking on the gray box and selecting another option.

Restricting Access to Items: You can also restrict access to items depending on certain factors, including a delay by date or time, student group membership, student name, or course completion progress. To set up an access restriction, first turn on editing using “Edit mode” toggle in the right hand corner. Click on three vertical dots to the right of the title of the item, then choose "Edit Settings" from the dropdown menu.  On the settings page, scroll down to the "Restrict access" section, and use the "Add restriction" prompt to set up the appropriate conditions.