Note: You are currently viewing documentation for Moodle 2.9. Up-to-date documentation for the latest stable version of Moodle may be available here: Navigation block.

Navigation block

From MoodleDocs

The navigation block appears on every page of the site. It contains an expanding tree menu which includes Dashboard, Site Pages 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. See the screencast Navigation block.

Overview

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

navblock29.png

Dashboard

This takes the user directly to their personal Dashboard.

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 notes, for instance.

navblockstudentadmin.png

My courses

This expands to show the courses the user is 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 expands to show other courses they are enrolled in.

Courses

If the administrator has enabled "show all courses" in Administration>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 Administration > 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 force the Dashboard, and then hide the navigation block.
  • This will push all users to the Dashboard 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.