Moodle+-+Customizing+your+Course+and+Gradebook

=A Review of Key Course Settings= We often get questions about a few of the key course settings in Moodle, so this would be a good topic to review. The one that comes up most often is related to the settings for “Enrollments.”

Often times while you are building your course, it is recommended that you set the course setting labeled “Course enrollable” to “No” as this prevents students from enrolling before the course is completed. But, when you are done building your course and want students to be able to enroll, you will need to go back into the course Settings area and change this setting to “Yes.” It is a good practice to set a reminder for yourself, either on a personal calendar or reminder of time type, to jog your memory to do this.

Tied closely to this setting are the settings under “Availability.” There are three key settings here. The first, “Availability” allows you to “hide” your course completely, which means it will not show up on any course listing, except to teachers of the course and administrators. Even if students try to access it directly using the URL, they will not be allowed to enter. So if you have set this to “hide” your course, you will need to revisit this setting when you are ready to make your course available.

If you have chosen to keep out students that are not enrolled in your class, you will need to decide on an “Enrollment Key” and enter it here. If you leave this field blank, anyone with a Moodle account will be able to enroll in your course. If you create an enrollment key, students who want to enroll will only need the key the **first time** they enter your course. After that, they will remain enrolled for the number of days (or for the date range) you set under the “Enrollments” settings. =Files and File Management= File organization in Moodle is critical. It is highly recommended that you devise a system for organizing your documents, handouts, pictures, and/or videos and do it early. If you wait and do this “after the fact,” you may end up with many broken activities and links to your documents. Reorganizing the mess takes longer than starting out with a well thought out plan and sticking to it.

Here are some questions to ask yourself before organizing your files. First, think about the types of files (documents, pictures, videos, etc.) you will need to include in your course. Would it work best to have the files arranged by topic/week (if your course is arranged this way)? Or would you like to arrange it by the type of file you have? Or would it work better with some combination of these? A lot depends on how many files you plan on uploading to make available in your course. If you only have a few, it probably does not matter much, but if you have many files, it will be critical. It is better to have a structure in place and not use it much, than to not have any structure and need it later.

If you are not good at organizing things, you may want to start with following the structure for your course and have a folder for every topic or week so that it matches your beginning block structure from your home page. If you think you will only have a few of something like pictures, you could also create an “Images” folder in which to place pictures. But if you use a lot of pictures in your course, then create an “Images” folder within each week or topic folder in which to place your images.

Once you have your structure in place, it will be easier to upload various handouts, pictures and/or videos as you build your course.

Uploading Files: Adding a photo or a document to your course
If you need a refresher on how to upload and add a document or photo to your course, you can refer to our