Naming Courses in your Staging Area

When naming your course mind that visible courses can be seen by folks in and outside of the college. To make them easier to find we do ask that some formatting be followed to allow Online Learning to provide timely support and manage old courses for archive.

Archived courses are only searchable via the Course Short Name and time of archive. Your future self will appreciate this as much as the Moodle Admins do.

Course Short Names will appear in the breadcrumbs and Nav drawer and must be unique to each course so we’re picky about these.

Course Long names should include all the information in the Short Name but may be embellished with addition information at your discretion.

Short Name Formatting

Course Short Name should include, with spaces between each and in this general order:

1. DEV designation (if applicable) for creating personal course masters/templates, building new courses, rebuilding old courses, etc. If you’re not planning a set section like -01 please use your personal initials like -JD
2. the Year (and term WI, SP, SU, or FA) where possible) in YYYY or YYYY/TT format.
   examples: 2019/FA, 2020, 2021/WI
3. (When applicable) please include the course code in a format of DPT-101-01 or DPT-101
4. Type of course so we know what it’s used for:
   • INCOMPLETE: to grant one or more students additional time to work on a course without affecting their classmates.
   • RESTORED YYYY/TT: These are to identify archived courses, You can restore your own archives with or without student data or ask us to restore an old course archive (we’ll name the course)
   • SANDBOX FIRSTNAME LASTNAME: You should have a sandbox in your staging area on creation but you can create additional ones to start with a new or more focused intent later on.

It’s not a huge deal if you don’t meet these exactly- an Admin will adjust the name when they encounter the course and if no year is included the current term will be added to the name when it’s found (which will indicate it to be removed 1.25 years from that term’s end). But it would make our lives much easier if you included the information in the proper format so it’s easy for us to find and manage.

Examples