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Navigation block

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The navigation block appears on every page of the site. It contains an expanding tree menu which includes My Home, Site Pages, My Profile, and Courses. What appears in the navigation block depends on the role of the user, where they are in the Moodle site, and any settings that have been applied globally.

Overview

The navigation block has links which can be expanded or collapsed.When logged in, a regular user will see the following as default:

navblock1.png

My home

This takes the user directly to their personal dashboard, My home.

Site pages

This expands to show pages and resources available site wide, for example, user blogs and a calendar. Any items which have been added to the front page, such as resources/activities from the Main Menu block, or the Site News will also appear here. Other items depend on the role of the user, so an administrator will see reports and notes, for instance.

sitepages.png

My profile

This expands to allow regular users to view (and, if allowed, edit) their profile, view their forum posts, view and add and blog entries and messages and access their private files, providing these features have been enabled by the administrator. The administrator will also have a link here to Notes and Activity reports.

viewprofilenavblock.png

My courses

This takes the user to their My Home page where they see the courses they are enrolled in. An administrator sees this link as "Courses", which expands to the course categories.

Navigation inside a course

Current course

When user is in a course, this link expands to show each section of the current course and any activities/resources which are in that section.

My courses

When a non-admin user clicks this link in a course, it takes them to their My home page where they will see other courses they are enrolled in.

Courses

If the administrator has enabled "show all courses" in Settings>Site administration>Appearance>Navigation, then clicking on this link in a course will take the user to the courses index page course/index.php.

The navigation block inside a course, showing current courses, my course and (all)courses

Navigation block settings

An administrator can change navigation settings, such as the default home page, and whether to show course categories in the navigation, in Settings > Site administration > Appearance > Navigation. See Navigation for details.

Hiding the navigation block

  • One way to make it harder for students to see other courses they are not enrolled in, is to implement the My Moodle page, and then hide the navigation block.
  • This will push all users to the My page on login, where they will see a list of those courses that they are enrolled in.
  • Hiding the navigation block will make it harder for them to find the other courses.

FAQ

Can you change what links are available in the navigation block?

Currently there are no admin settings to modify what is available in this block except as indicated above. To do this requires a code hack.

This could change. See the discussion here: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=218358 and the tracker item here to do with options to change the settings block: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-36585

Or you can always try some contrib (3rd party) Navigation blocks that allow you to setup what is available on the menu.