Moodle site - basic structure
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Template:Moodle site - basic structure
How does Moodle work?
The front page
- The Front page of a Moodle site - the page you reach from your browser - usually includes information about the establishment itself and can be highly customised.
- It is also possible to lock the front page down so that all a user sees when they click on the Moodle URL is a log in screen.
Inside Moodle
- Moodle's basic structure is organised around courses. These are basically pages or areas within Moodle where teachers can present their learning resources and activities to students.
- Courses can have different layouts according to teacher preference or establishment policy, but they usually have a number of central sections where materials are displayed and side blocks offering extra features or information.
- Courses can contain content for a year's studies, a single session or any other variants depending on the teacher or establishment. They can be used by one teacher or shared by a group of teachers. Students can self -enrol, be enrolled manually by their teacher or automatically by the admin.
- Courses are organised into categories. Physics, Chemistry and Biology courses might come under the Science category for instance.
Teachers, students and other Moodle users
- You don't enter Moodle with the "teacher" or "student" role.
- Everyone who logs into Moodle has no special privileges until they are allocated roles by the administrator according to their needs in individual courses or contexts.
Finding your way around
- A logged in user can access areas of Moodle such as their courses or profile from the Navigation block and Settings block. What a user sees in these blocks depends on their role and any privileges granted them by the administrator.
- Each user has their own customisable page, accessed from the Myhome link.
An overview and hierarchy of the basic structure in simple terms:
- The Moodle site - the largest context, the entire file cabinet.
- Category - A place to organize courses, a file drawer.
- Front Page - A special course, with its own file drawer.
- Course - A place to enrol users, a large hanging file folder in a file drawer.
- Course sections/topics - A way to visually organize Activities and Resources, a special type of folder in a course.
- Activities - Interactive tools the teacher can place in a course, each is a different colored folders placed in a topic.
- Resources - Passive tools that may link to other places, a different colored folders placed in a topic.
- Blocks - Areas in a course that are not visually in a topic, each has its own colored folder in a course.
- Pages - visually what is seen at any moment, individual sheets of paper filed away.
For example, a course can contain 1 or more sections, each section can contain many activities and resources. One section might contain 3 different resource links to pdf files, 2 links to other webpages, 2 Lessons, 2 Assignments and 1 Quiz. The teacher determines what a student is going to see and when.
- What the user can do or see, depends upon their role in any specific context. Thus a teacher will see pages in a different way than a student. For example, a student can not see the "Editing and updating Quiz" page in the Features Moodle Course, in topic 8, for a quiz activity called "A listening quiz". However, both a student and teacher can view and interact with different question pages in that quiz activity.
