The Edit 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 the Settings link within the respective Secondary navigation.
Remember to click on the Save changes button at the bottom of the screen when you are finished making any changes. The following is an explanation of the sections on the Edit course settings page.
A majority of the items listed in this section are provided by an outside system, attempting to modify the items NOT highlighted in red (Course visibility, Enable download course content, Enable end date, and Calculate the end date from the number of sections) will result in those values reverting back to what they were within the next hour. The only exception to this is courses you have created within your own staging area.
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 Moodle Dashboard or the directory path (bread crumbs). These will be determined for you when a course is initially provisioned.
The Course visibility 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.
NOTE: While you can manually change this value, toggling 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 toggle your course visibility and have it stick.
The Enable download course content 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.
The Course start date* will affect when weekly format topic dates appear and how weekly sections are named. Courses will become visibile to students on this day (The Monday of the week that the course starts)
The Course end date* is when your Moodle course will automatically close to students. If you have students who need more time in a course you can change this value the day after the end date or instead create an Incomplete course in your staging area.
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 and is probably in your or someone else’s staging area.)
NOTE: Items marked with an Asterisk(*) will revert back to their default values within an hour while a normal course is active and so these should only be changed if the course lives in your Staging Area
The Course summary* will appear on the course listings page of if an enrolled user has their Moodle Dashboard set to show Summaries instead of Cards. Attempts to change this in normal courses will result in it reverting back within the hour.
We encourage you to set a Course image! It 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 and are the visual that will appear on the Moodle Dashboard.
If you leave this empty your course will default to a colorful, geometric pattern.
There are many Format options in the drop-down menu. The most common are Weekly format and Topics format.
The Hidden sections allows you to decide how the hidden sections in your course are displayed (or not) to students. They can be completely invisible, or shown as collapsed sections which indicate where the hidden material will become available.
The Course layout is less important starting in Moodle 4+. Setting this value to the non-default value of Show one section per page will allow students to see the WHOLE course or limit their view to the Course Essentials and the chosen section/week/topic. Some people may be confused by this.
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.
Legacy course files should only be enabled for very old courses. In newer courses this may just result in just another place to store files that are not easily found or used.
You can set a maximum size for files that students can upload under Maximum upload size.
NOTE: We strongly discourage uploading especially large files directly to Moodle. (It makes it very hard for us to upload a copy of your course if something goes wrong as we have these same file size limits.) Try to optimize them for the web in the program you made them in or upload large multimedia files to something like Kaltura.
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.
