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Tutorial
Moodle Primer Part 2: Administering a Course
10/10/2007
As fun as creating a course in Moodle is (the subject of part 1 of this two-part series), eventually it will go live, and the real excitement can begin as administration kicks in. The first thing you will come to realize is that while you believed you had thought through every single thing, you missed about half.Not to fret: Moodle is as adaptive once the course has gone live as it is during creation.
In this article, I'll walk through common issues and changes and how to address them. While it isn't possible to be inclusive of every problem that can arise in a course, this should provide a good baseline for predicaments you may find yourself in.
Seeing Who Has Done What
To see who has accessed the course, you can click on the Participants link on the main page. This will show you such things as the user name and how long it has been since their last access. You can reorganize the list in any order you want and from here, and you can click on any user and see the variables associated with them.
Of those variables, clicking on the Activity Report tab will show you how many times they looked at each resource and when they last did so.
From the main page, you can also click on any activity (Quizzes, Resources, Assignments, etc.) and see how many users have accessed each ("14 students have made 14 attempts" and so on).
If you click on the attempts, you will see the list of users and the variables about their access of that item. For example, on a quiz, you will see when each user accessed the quiz, when they completed it, how long they spent on it, their score, and the feedback given to them.
One of the most useful links here is Item Analysis, which will give you the psychometrics on each question.
Finally, from the main page, you can choose Reports and view the log files to see any or all activities, actions, and participants for any time period that you specify.
Changing the Outline and Items
As the course progresses, you may find that you are not able to cover material as quickly as you thought you would. You may also get a dozen e-mails from students informing you of a spelling error in a label, a link that does not work, or something similar.
All of these can be addressed by clicking "Turn editing on" beneath Administration.
Fig. 1 shows the view with editing off, and Fig. 2 shows the same view with editing on.
Fig. 1: The Outline view of an existing course. Click to enlarge image.
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