Library Guides: Moodle Quickstart Guide for Faculty: Course Settings

Course Settings

You can click on Settings on the course main page to modify a number of settings about your course, such as the start and end dates.

Course full name and Course short name are automatically set.

For details about a setting, you can click on the Help icon (TIP: wherever you see the icon you can click for more information).

Here are some useful settings:

General
- Course start date - This setting affects the display of the weekly format topic dates (the weeks will start from the course start date and will be updated automatically), and also whether the courses appear in the Past, In Progress, or Future section of the Course overview.
- Course end date - If enabled, this date is used for determining whether a course should be included in a user's list of courses. When the end date is past, the course is no longer listed in the In Progress section. It is good practice to include a couple of weeks before the end of class, to make sure that students can access exams and gradebook.
- Calculate the end date from the number of sections - For courses in weekly format only, the course end date may be calculated automatically based on the course start date and the number of weeks. If course sections (weeks) are added or removed, the course date is changed automatically. If Calculate the end date from the number of sections is ticked, the course end date can not be set manually. Please, bear in mind that if you use this feature, the course will be In progress based on the number of sections: that is to say that, if you only have five sections, the course will become Past after five weeks.
Course Format
- Format - This setting determines if you want to organize the course into weekly sections or topics.
- Course layout - You can Show all sections on one page (all course content available at a glance, but a lot of scrolling involved) or Show one section per page (a neater view, but users have to click each section to navigate the content).
Appearance
- Show gradebook to students - Since not all faculty use the Moodle gradebook, this setting is by default set to No, in order to avoid confusion for the students. If you wish to use the gradebook and make it visible to the students, you should change this setting to Yes.
Groups
- Group mode - Here you can decide to use different groups at the course level. Using groups can be helpful for professors teaching different sections of the same course.

Moodle Docs - Course Settings
Here you can find more information about the course settings.

Course Format

The course format setting refers to the layout of the course. There are four standard course formats:

Social format - The course is organized like a discussion forum.
Single Activity format - The course only has one section where the instructor can display one activity.
Weekly format - The course is organized by weeks and the system automatically creates a section for each week.
Topics format - The course is organized by topic sections. By default, the sections are named Topic 1, Topic 2, etc. If you want to change the name of the section, enable the editing mode. Click on the Edit option corresponding to the section, then select Edit topic.