Course homepage

There are several formats for a course homepage (see below). Most course formats have block areas on the left and right sides, with course and Resources grouped by sections in the center column.

Standard view of a blank course

Generally speaking, the first or top section is not numbered and was designed for general information and to contain activities and resources useful during the course. Most courses will have at least one additional section.

The look of your course homepage also depends on which block areas you choose to appear using the Blocks field. All of the blocks can be moved up or down or to the other outside column according to one's liking. Activities and resources can be moved to any place within the center column. And the HTML editor can turn a plain homepage of text into a visual riot if required.

Here are basic elements of a course page and links to Moodle documentation.

Example of Weekly format, teacher view, edit off - full resolution here

Parts of a course homepage

Column left	Course sections-Center	Column right
*1 Course full name	*7 Section header & News topic	*10 Login information
*2 Navigation bar	*8 Current week - First section	*11 Edit on button
*3 Course description	*9 Future week - Second section	*12 Latest news
*4 Participant list		*13 Upcoming events
*5 Forum list		*14 Recent activity
*6 Course administration block

Examples of course formats

Topic format example

Example of Topic format. Click on image to enlarge

This is a downloaded version of demo.moodle.org, using the Topic course format.

Weekly format example

Example of Weekly format, teacher viewing as student

This is a downloaded version of demo.moodle.org, using the weekly course format.

Social format example

Example of Social format. Click on image to enlarge

This is a downloaded version of demo.moodle.org, using the Social course format. The existing activities seemed to disappear. The teacher added two forums and a student added a third popular topic.

Other format examples

There are also SCORM and LAMS course formats.

Course themes

Some sites may allow teachers to select themes for their courses that are different from the Moodle site homepage. A theme can effect colours, font sizes and page layouts.

In course settings, Teachers will see a "Force theme" drop down menu in the general section that contains a list of available themes. Non-editing teacher can not alter this setting. The default course theme is the site theme or the category theme.

The site administrator or course manager should look at Theme_settings or Administration>Configuration>Variables (older versions of Moodle) and change the allowcoursethemes to yes.

Drag and drop

Be aware that drag and drop for course sections currently (25th Feb 2008) has an issue and only support dragging a course section onto an adjacent section. Fix on the way: MDL-11539

Making your course home page look more like a regular webpage

Often when a course has a lot of content, students and teachers find the long scrolling tedious and would prefer a 'neater' appearance with hyperlinks to sections in a similar way to the way pages on websites work.

While anchors/section links can help, the course page is still very long.

Hiding the activities with the eye results in their being not available for students to use.

One method which might be useful is to put the activities into sections which are then made 'unseen'.

Basic Example

• Make your course as usual but add an extra topic at the bottom.
• Say if your course has 6 topics - give it 7
• Add activities in topic 7 - eg a quiz
• Get the url of your quiz; copy it and keep it somewhere (such as notepad) for later
• Go back to course admin>settings and set your topic/weeks for 6; ie one fewer than you had before
• The section with your quiz will no longer be on the page
• In another section, make a hyperlink to the quiz using the url you have already copied and kept safe -either in a topic summary/ label or
• via Add a resource>link to a file or website
• You will see that the quiz is accessible to students even though the section it appears in doesn't physically appear on the course page.

More advanced example

• Here is a youtube video that gives an example of how to do this: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=XtHPUh_BaxM
• You can actually set up your whole course using this method.
• Set your course to have two topics (or more if you wish)
• Ignore topic 1
• In topic 2, use Compose a webpage to make webpages relating to your units of work/topics
• Add all your resources to topic 2 (etc)
• Copy their urls into the relevant webpage as hyperlinks
• In topic 0, the course summary make hyperlinks -or better- images hyperlinked - to each webpage which contains the activities of that unit/topic
• Go back to course settings and set the number to 1.

See also

• Course sections - some information about weekly and topic sections
• Blocks (teacher) - some links to different types of blocks
• Adding/editing_a_course for more information about a course
• For Administrators - Administration block, configuration, variables and interface settings.