Course Settings Page

General

For provisioned courses, a majority of the settings listed in this area are determined by the college scheduling system. Do not modify settings marked with a * in your provisioned courses. You should only modify these settings in courses that are created within your own staging area.

• Course full name* – is the complete name of the course. It appears on the My courses page and the header section of the course.
• Course short name* – is a shortened name for the course. This will appear in the directory path when you are not on the course main page.
• Course Category* – is how courses are organized in Moodle. All provisioned courses are placed in the Courses/Year-Term category. If you have a course in your staging area it will be placed in the Faculty Workspace category that has been created for you.
• Course visibility* – determines if students can access the course. This setting will automatically change to Show on the Course start date, and change to Hide on the Course end date.

NOTE: While you can manually change this setting, doing this on the same calendar date as either Start date or End date will result in this value reverting back. If you need to open or close your course at a different time you will need to wait until the next day to change the course visibility.

• Enable download course content – will allow a user (Teacher or Student) to download the entire course content as a Zip file. This feature is disabled by default but if you would like for students to download a copy of your course for their own reference offline you can enable this.
• Course start date* – is when the course will automatically become available to students. For provisioned courses this is the first day of the term if the course starts the first week, or first class meeting if the course starts in the middle of a term. If you believe the course start date is wrong in Moodle please verify the course start date listed in the Course Scheduling is correct. Changing this value in Moodle will not stay.
• Course end date* – is when the course will automatically become unavailable to students. For provisioned courses this is set to 7 days after the end date of the course listed in Course Scheduling. If you believe this date is incorrect please verify the course end date listed in the Course Schedule.
• Course ID number* – is unique number used to link this course with courses in our college system. Do not alter this field. Provisioned course will automatically be assigned the correct ID number, and courses created in your staging area do not need this field.

Description

• Course summary* – will appear on the My courses page if a user has set to show Summary instead of Card. The summary for provisioned courses come from the course schedule and should not be changed.
• Course image – is the image users will see for the course on the Dashboard and My courses. This can be any image file (.jpg, .png, .gif) that you feel like represents your course. If you leave this empty your course will default to a colorful, geometric pattern image.

Course format

• Format – determines the layout of the course.
  • Weekly format is the default. It 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, and will set the default section names based on the course start date.
  • Topics format organizes the course into topics. The instructor will need to modify the Section names for each topic. This format should be used if your course is objective based and each objective may take different amounts of time to complete.
  • Single activity format allows a single activity or resource (quiz, URL, SCORM, etc.).
  • Social Format will have a single forum for the course page. If all you want to use Moodle for is a class discussion you can use this format.
• 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 that students cannot expand.
• Course layout is set to Show all sections on one page by default. Prior to Moodle 4.1 you may have selected Show one section per page to limit scrolling, but this layout can lead to some confusion since users will either be able to see the whole course or just the Course Essentials area and a chosen section. Since we can collapse and expand sections in Moodle 4.1 it is best to use the default setting.

Appearance

• Force language will change the language that is used for the Moodle elements of the course. This will not change the language of the course content. The default is Do not force so it will use the students preferred language.
• Number of announcements determines how many announcements will show in the Latest announcements block. It is set to 0 by default. If you wish to use the Latest announcement block you will need to change this value.
• Show gradebook to students allows students to access the gradebook. This is set to Yes by default. Only select No if you do not want students to see their grades.
• Show activity reports allows students to access their activity reports via their profile page. This is set to No by default.
• Show activity dates shows the activity dates on the course page. This is set to No by default.

Groups

• Group mode is where you enable groups in your course. There are three options; No groups, Separate groups and Visible groups. This will be the default group setting for all activities added to your course.
  • No groups is the default setting and this will indicate that the activity is to be completed as individuals.
  • Separate groups the activity will be completed in groups, and other groups will not be able to see their work in activities like forums and glossaries.
  • Visible groups will only be able to participate with own group, but can view work being completed by other groups.
• Force group mode if you want to have some activities set up with groups, and some set up with No groups you will need to change this to No. The default setting is Yes. 
• Default grouping is the grouping that you want to use by default for new activities. Before you can change this setting you will need to first create your groups and groupings for the course.