Moodle Primer Part 1: Creating a Class

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Tutorial

Moodle Primer Part 1: Creating a Class

10/3/2007

By Emmett Dulaney

In a recent article, I mentioned my newfound affection for the open-source course management system Moodle. It's a great CMS, but there's not a lot of current information available on it. So, in this two-part tutorial, we'll walk through the use of it, starting in Part 1 with the creation of a class and setting up the resources needed for it. (In Part 2, which will appear next week, we'll examine the administration of the course once it's created and available.)

Settings
To create a course, the first thing you must do is establish its settings, or attributes. This is accomplished on the Edit Course Settings page, as shown in Fig. 1. While all of the settings are important, those beneath the General frame truly dictate everything else. The two name fields define what students will see when they look at all the courses that are available in your Moodle implementation and should be descriptive enough to head off phone calls from those who cannot find the course they're supposed to be taking.

Fig. 1: The Edit Course Settings page allows you to define the key attributes of the course. Click to enlarge image.

The Summary field holds free text and a great many tools in the toolbar that you will see throughout when dealing with text fields. A recent addition to the toolbar is that of Spell Check (third from the end on the second row) that has been greatly missed.

The Format can be weekly, topics-based, or any of a number of other choices. For traditional courses, the weekly format works well, but, if you're using rolling enrollment (such as with prerequisite courses that will always be open), then the topics-based option is a better solution.

Beneath the General frame are a number of frames related to enrollment. Here you can choose to limit the enrollment, cluster students into groups, allow guest access, and so on. Most importantly is the field beneath the Availability frame that allows you to set the enrollment key. This is a string value you specify that the students must give in order to enroll in the class. They will not be able to enroll in the class unless they give this value, and they must only give it the one time.

Outline
After you choose to save your settings, you are presented with the course in an outline view, as shown in Fig. 2.

Within the left frame, you have People, Activities, Search Forums, and Administration.