It will soon be time to prepare your Semester 1 Moodle course. Over the coming days I will post some useful ideas and tips. The posts will include ‘before’ and ‘after’ visual examples:

Throughout Semester check and review content from previous weeks: Hide content which is no longer relevant to students, especially time-dependent information. Review content from previous weeks

Keep the General section at top of your course short: Ensure that the General section has limited content. The student will have to scroll past the General section regardless of which Unit/Week section they choose to go to so it must be kept short. How do I organise the General section?

Try not to put too much content on the course page: such as large blocks of text. The course page should be used as a place to ‘signpost’/link to content. Students may be accessing the course on devices with small screens so make use of the Page and File resources (amongst others) to present content to your students. Don’t swamp the course page with content

Use clear and consistent naming conventions across courses: For example, use agreed naming conventions for assessments across all modules in a Programme, such as, Coursework 1, Coursework 2, or Assignment 1, Assignment 2. Links and activities/resources should have sensible names describing the content. For example, ‘Useful article’ for a URL is not descriptive enough.

You may wish to refer to a particular File resource from several places within your course: For example, you may want to reference the Module Handbook from the ‘Assessment’ section of your course. You can achieve this by creating a hyperlink, or URL resource. How do I create a hyperlink to a file resource?

Remove a section if it is not required: You may find that you aren’t making use of a particular section provided by the Topics course template; if so, you can hide or remove it. Remove a section if it is not required