The Course Settings page is where an instructor creates and manages a course’s overall settings. Other Settings pages will be specific to the page you are on when you click Edit settings. Remember to click on the Save changes button when you are finished making any changes. The following is an explanation of the eight sections on the Course Settings page.
The Course full name is the complete name of the course. It sometimes appears as a link on course lists. It also appears in the header section of the course. The Course short name is used where the long name is not appropriate, such as the Navigation block or the directory path (bread crumbs). These will be determined for you when a course is initially provisioned.
The Visible drop-down menu is quite important. This is what an instructor will use to make a course visible (choose Show) or not visible (choose Hide) to students. See Start Of Term Procedures or End Of Term Procedures for more information.
The Course start date should be set to the day the term begins. It will affect when weekly format topic dates appear and how weekly sections are named.
The Course end date should be set for the last day you want your course showing up to you and students. The day grades are due, or the last day the class meets are the suggested values for this or letting the course section count declare the length (this assumes you have 11 sections/weeks in your course).
KNOWN ISSUE: If this value is set or defaults to be before the class ends it may appear under Past courses on the Moodle dashboard and students may think they’ve lost access to it entirely.
The Course ID number is an alphanumeric field used to match this course against an external system’s ID. Do not alter this number. (If the value is empty then this course was created Manually)
The Course summary will appear on the course listings page. This field is searched when searching for a course.
Course summary files can be an image (.jpg or .png) or other file type. They will be accessible by anyone from outside of the course just like the course name and/or summary.
There are many Format options in the drop-down menu. The most common are Weekly format and Topics format.
Weekly format organizes the course week by week, with a clear start date and a finish date. Moodle will create a section for each week of your course. Make sure your course start date is correct (above).
Topics format organizes the course into topic sections that an instructor can give titles to. Each topic section consists of activities, resources and labels. This is great to use if your course is objective based and each objective may take different amounts of time to complete.
The Number of sections drop-down menu is only used by the Weekly and Topics course formats. In the Weekly format , the number specifies the total weeks that the course will run. In the Topics format, the number specifies how many topics are in the course. Both of these translate to the number of sections on the course page.
The Hidden sections allows you to decide how the hidden sections in your course are displayed to students. They can be completely invisible, or shown as collapsed sections which indicate where the hidden material will become available.
The Course layout determines whether the whole course is displayed on one page or split over several pages. If Show one section per page is selected, the course page is abbreviated to a list of links to individual sections.
You can choose the theme you want to use to display a course under Force theme. Selecting Do not force reverts to the default Clackamas Moodle theme.
Under Force language only English is currently available.
News items to show determines how many news items should show in the Latest news block. Set it to 0 and the Latest news block will not appear.
Show gradebook to students is set to Yes by default. Only select No if you do not want students to see their grades.
Show activity reports determines whether to show students their activity reports.
You can set a maximum size for files that students can upload under Maximum upload size.
Under the Group mode drop-down, there are three options; No groups, Separate groups and Visible groups. This sets the default for the course.
See Creating Groups Within Your Course for more information.
Changing Role names is not recommended for beginning users as it can create confusion. Only the displayed role names are changed. The roles used in creating permissions are not affected.
