Moodle Course Settings (Edit Settings)
Overview
Moodle offers you a great deal of flexibility in changing the appearance of your course if you are not
happy with the default layouts.
You may want to edit course settings such as Course Format (weekly, topic, social), and Availability
to students, number of weeks etc. This can be completed at the initial setup or edited any time during
the course by clicking on Edit Settings which is located under Course Administration in the left
column of the template.
This tip-sheet will describe each setting and how you can edit it.
Setting up your course
Ÿ This Should Take Approximately 10 Minutes
To access the course settings, click on the Edit
Settings link
under
the Course
Administration block.
This will open up a new window. Each section is
described below.
Category, Course Short name and Course ID
number: These fields are locked and cannot be
changed.
Course Summary: Allows you to write a brief
description of your course.
© 2012 LSHTM, Leman Aydemir
Format: The course format you choose will
determine the basic layout of your course. You can
change the format of your course from the drop
down list.
•
•
•
Weekly: The course is organised week by week,
with a clear start date and a finish date. Moodle
will create a section for each week of your
course.
Topic: The course is organised into topic
sections. You can add a title to each topic.
Social: This format is oriented around one main
forum, the social forum, which appears on the
main page.
Number of weeks/topics: You can specify the
number of weeks or topics in your course. If you
add more topics/weeks Moodle will add new,
blank topics/weeks below your old ones. If you
decrease the number, then the ones already
existing will be hidden but no information will be
lost.
Course start date: Select a new date from the
drop down menu to change the start date. If using
the weekly format this will affect the display date
of the weeks in your centre block area. The first
week will start on the date you set. This setting
will not affect courses using the Social or Topics
formats.
Hidden sections: This option allows you to
decide how the hidden sections in your course are
displayed to students. Here you can specify if
hidden sections are shown in collapsed form
(greyed out) or completely invisible to students. If
© 2012 LSHTM, Leman Aydemir
you choose the
collapsed
form
students
still
cannot
actually
see the hidden
activities.
This setting determines whether a user can
access the course as a guest, without being
required to enrol. Please leave this as No as the
School does not allow guest access.
Group Mode
Moodle
can
create student
groups. Here
you can define
the
group
mode at the
course level
from the drop
down menu.
•
•
•
News items to show: This will only have effect if
you have the "Latest News" block enabled. If so,
you can indicate how many news items you would
like to show in the block.
Show gradebook to students: This setting
allows you to select whether students can see the
grades via a link in the course administration
menu. If set to No, it doesn’t stop you from
recording grades, but simply prevents the
students from seeing them.
Show Activity Report: This shows a log of
student activity in the current course. As well as
listings of their contributions, these reports include
detailed access logs. These are always available
to instructors. Setting this to Yes enables students
to view their individual activity history in your
course.
Maximum Upload Size: This setting defines the
largest size of file that can be uploaded by
students in this course.
Guest access: (not editable)
© 2012 LSHTM, Leman Aydemir
No groups - there are no sub groups and
everyone is part of one big community.
Separate groups - each group member only
see their own group’s contributions and others
are invisible.
Visible groups - each group member works
in their own group, but can also see other
groups, but not participate.
Student progress
If set to
Enabled,
control via
completion and activity settings, you and your
students can track progress and use the Course
completion block. You can have check boxes
appear next to required activities in course
Sections, then let students check the boxes when
they have completed an activity, or the box can be
checked when an activity is submitted or graded.
Role Renaming (not editable)
This is not allowed. Please leave as it is.
The group mode can be defined at two levels:
Course level: The group mode defined at
the course level is the default mode for all
activities defined within that course.
Activity level: Each activity that supports
groups can also define its own grouping
mode.
Force Group Mode: If the group mode is set to
force group mode, then this will override the
individual group settings in each activity.
Availability
Use this setting to control student access to your
course. When you want students to have access
to your course, this setting needs to be changed
to “this course is available to students.”
Language (not editable)
There is only one English language pack available
in Moodle.
© 2012 LSHTM, Leman Aydemir
When you have made your changes to Course
Settings click Save changes and return to your
course.