Setting up your Moodle Course
How can Moodle best support your teaching? What options do you have for presenting your course contents? This guide has the answers!
Interactivity and organization are the two biggest factors that can help you organize your course.
Interactivity: How will students interact with your site?
The elements of a Moodle course (readings, assignments, forums, and so forth) can be used to create different levels of interactivity for your site. It’s useful to think of there being three distinct levels of interactivity. From least interactive to most interactive, we’ll call these categories Refer, Respond, and Collaborate.
If you’re new to using Moodle, or if you want to focus on a few elements in your course without spending too much time, the Refer category is a good place to start. However, we encourage you to mix and match elements from throughout this list to curate your Moodle course.
If you’re using this worksheet electronically, you can use the links to read more details on any of the elements below. If not, use the listed page numbers to find them later in this guide.
1. Refer
Moodle acts as an electronic syllabus, or as a dropbox your students can visit to access course documents online. Your students might...
- Download the syllabus, readings, slides from class, or assignment handouts
- Watch or listen to videos or sound files
- Read reflection questions, a summary of a class meeting, or other guiding text
- Check calendar information about class dates, cancellations or holidays
- View office hours and contact information for you or TAs
2. Respond
Moodle acts as an electronic classroom, where your students participate by contributing their own work online. In addition to the options above, your students might...
- Submit their work electronically
- Make posts or journal entries
- Receive comments, “grades” or other feedback from you
- Complete quizzes, surveys or polls
3. Collaborate
Moodle acts as an electronic team, where students can collaborate with one another in more complex ways. In addition to the options above, your students might...
- Discuss with classmates in forums
- Peer-review work done by their classmates in a workshop
- Collaborate to build a shared knowledge base throughout the semester
- Connect with TAs or each other
This tier works well when combined with other online tools we have available, including Google Drive/Documents, or even WordPress. Feel free to get in touch with us at moodle@hampshire.edu if you’d like to explore those options further.
3.5 Administrative Tools
These further options are useful to you as the teacher.
- Record attendance
- Email students
- Make your course visible to students
Organization: How will your site be organized?
By Schedule
By class meeting: Use Class by date format. This is the default format. A section will be created for each class meeting indicating the date and time. Section titles will appear like the following example: Thursday, 24 January (02:30PM - 03:50PM)
By week: Use Weekly format. Each week of the semester will have its own section. Section titles will appear like the following example: 23 January - 29 January
By Concept
By function: Some faculty like to organize the elements in their Moodle course by their use. We suggest the Topics format or Class By Date format for this purpose. In either format, you can change the section headings to whichever labels you like. You might make separate sections for resources, required or optional readings, assignments or projects, class notes, discussion forums, video/audio materials, or any other categories applicable to your course.
By topic or theme: If themes are the most useful unit of structure for your course, we also suggest Topics format or Class by Date format. In either format, you can change the section headings to whichever labels you like.
Hybrid Organization Ideas
About 20% of the courses from Fall 2018 make use of more than method of organization. Here are some ideas for how to combine the above methods:
- If you organize primarily by Schedule, you can place material that you’d like to bring to your students’ attention right away in the General section at the very top of your course.
- Remember that no matter which format you use, you can change the titles of the sections however you like. This can help you indicate additional information that connects more than one organization style, like topic and date.