Moodle Course Template Recommendations

This page provides an overview of options to consider when you create a Moodle template. Although Moodle does not have specific template functionality, you can design, create and apply any Moodle courseas a template by importing its content into other courses.

N.B. Each faculty now has the ability to apply a category. In general the TELT Admin who represents each school or faculty on the TELT Advisory Group will manage this.

When to use

Consider these recommendations when you want to create a standard Moodle template to be used by individuals working across multiple courses at any level: faculty, school, program or course.

Benefits

The guidelines will help you to design and implement consistent, user friendly, and easy to navigate Moodle courses. They include information on choosing between various course formats, selecting blocks, course layout and style options, file management methods and instructions on importing templates into new courses.

Template guidelines

1. Choose a page format

When choosing a page format, consider all the pros and cons. The Collapsed Topic page format provides the best flexibility and advantages. Topic and Weekly formats are also very useful, and are simpler to use. A very good feature of Moodle is that you can easily switch from one format to another without losing any content or adversely affecting your courses in any way.

Format

Advantages

Disadvantages

Recommendations

Collapsed Topic
  • Students have more control over what they see.
  • Simplifies course page.
  • Reduces clutter in courses that have a lot of topics or multiple activities and resources
  • Can still be used with either a week or topic structure, with activities and resources only visible if sections are toggled open
  • Can be arranged to show Latest week first or Current topic first.
    See a demo of layout configuration options at http://youtu.be/gvo-OseVKr8 (0:00–2:23)
  • Inappropriate choice of section colours and fonts can affect accessibility.
  • Individual sections, once opened, can still suffer from the same issues as other formats and appear text heavy, crowded and too long unless deliberately designed with the recommended strategies outlined in the course design guidelines below.

Use colours that are accessible to colour-blind users and that have high contrast. Dark text on a light background (e.g. a black font on grey topics) is recommended, rather than light on dark, which is harder to read.

Colour blindness considerations: http://blog.templatemonster.com/2012/03/21/designing-colorblind-friendly-website/

Use the course design guidelines below to add images that break up the heavy text-based look and feel of the course page. Use the recommended strategies to minimise the amount of text and the number of items that display on the course page.

Topic
  • Useful for scaffolding learning where one topic builds on another
  • Useful for separating resources and activities into types, e.g. Resources, Lectures, Assignments, Quizzes
  • This is the simplest format to use, with minimal setup required other than giving each topic a name.
  • Without a course timeline students can become confused about what they should be working on and how to stay on track.
  • The course page can look very text heavy.
  • The course page can quickly become content heavy, requiring a lot of scrolling. Students may find it hard to navigate and find items.

Using a Moodle “Page” resource, create a course map or matrix (table) with a weekly timeframe.

From this map, link to each relevant resource or activity in the course.

Use the Calendar block to add Group or Course events.

Adding closing dates to course activities—assignments, quizzes etc.—will cause them to display in the Calendar block as course events.

Use the course design guidelines below to add images that break up the heavy text-based look and feel of the course page. Use the recommended strategies to minimise the amount of text and the number of items that display on the course page.

Weekly
  • Activities and resources are organised by week.
  • Provides a start and finish date for each section of activities and resources, which helps students stay on track
  • Useful in courses where students work on the same materials at the same time
  • Particularly relevant for fully online courses where students need to maintain regular participation
  • Activities can become lost inside weekly sections full of long lists of resources.
  • Course start date must be edited each semester.
  • The course page can look very text heavy.
  • The course page can quickly become content heavy requiring a lot of scrolling. Students may find it hard to navigate and find items.

 

Use the Activities block to enable students to quickly access all the activity modules inside the course.

Make sure your course start date in the Edit settings page is correct: if it is not, your weeks will have the wrong dates.

In the course settings, allow for the mid-semester study break when entering the number of weeks required.

Use the course design guidelines below to add images that break up the heavy text-based look and feel of the course page. Use the recommended strategies to minimise the amount of text and the number of items that display on the course page.

Grid

Grid format is not currently readable by JAWS screen reading software for visually impaired students.

Staff are advised not to use this format for new courses, and to reformat existing Grid format courses using Topics or Weekly format.

Please see the Known Issues page.
  • Modular and visual format
  • Useful for discrete topics where no sequence is necessary
  • Images bring colour to the course and create a much more attractive course page than other course formats' text-based appearance.
  • Not a mobile device friendly layout
  • Difficult to structure learning pathways
  • Requires much more effort to set up
  • Images used must be the correct size (210 pixels wide by 140 pixels high); they can’t be resized after uploading into the grid.
  • Images must be copyright free, or accompanied by a copyright notice or attribution notice.
  • Individual sections, once opened, can suffer from the same issues as other formats and appear text heavy, crowded and too long unless deliberately designed according to the guidelines below.

Don’t put too many resources or activities into Topic 0 (the course summary section) when using the grid format. It makes the page look unbalanced and pushes the grid images too far down the page.

Use the course design guidelines below to add images that break up the heavy text-based look and feel of the course page. Use the recommended strategies to minimise the amount of text and the number of items that display on the course page.

Social

The entire course becomes one big forum that displays on the course page.
  • No other activity or resource modules can be added to the course
  • Does not provide the capabilities of a regular forum activity module used for learning and teaching purposes
  • Has limited value as a course format

Not recommended as a course format but may be useful in circumstances where only a social discussion area is required.

SCORM

Provides only one section, where a pre-built SCORM package can be inserted
  • Only useful where the entire course consists of an externally packaged course
  • No other resources or activities can be used.

SCORM packages can also be added to courses with other formats and content, by using the SCORM resource module.

See http://scorm.com/scorm-explained/ for more information about SCORM.

Find out more about configuring the course formats:

2. Select blocks

Use the blocks section of your course home page to enhance your course template with important information or convenient functionality. Be selective about which blocks you incorporate into your template and remove any block that does not add value. There are numerous blocks to choose from; the following list contains only the most common or useful blocks. Other available blocks will provide useful functionality only if they are directly relevant to your course's learning and teaching strategies.

When adding blocks, think about whether they should display only on the course main page or on any other page inside the course. Blocks can be easily rearranged into a different order.

Activities

This block provides quick links to all course activities.

Course menu

Along with the Activities block, this block is a very useful tool for navigating within a course. You can customise it to contain particular parts of the course that you access regularly, listed in a particular order. You can also use it to organise course topics into chapters and sub-chapters.

When you link to a topic, this block uses the topic summary title as the link text.

People

  • The People block links to the Participants page, which lists all participants in the course. From that page, users can access each other’s profiles.
  • Also enables instructors to message all or selected students.

Latest news

  • This block displays posts from the News forum.
  • To avoid confusion, rename the News forum in Topic 0 "Latest news".

Messages

  • The Messages block displays a list of new messages users have received, and links them to their Messages window. The Messages window is used to send messages to individuals.

HTML

  • Use this block to include the course instructor's image and contact hours/details, or even to embed a welcome video.
  • Add useful links to the course page, e.g. IT Service Centre, Library, Learning Centre or course-specific links.
  • You can add multiple HTML blocks, whereas most other blocks can only be added once.
  • You can create a simple course menu using the HTML block, in which case you will have full control over the text. To do so:
    1. Change your course settings to display only one section at a time.
    2. Visit each section individually to copy its URL and store it temporarily in a text editor (e.g. Notepad or TextEdit).
    3. Enter the section names in the HTML block.
    4. Hyperlink the section names to the section pages using the stored URLs.

Find out more about blocks on the page Use blocks in Moodle.

3. Course layout and style guidelines

Topic 0 considerations

Topic 0 (the course summary section) occupies prime screen real estate at the top of the course page. Resist the temptation to fill it up with branding or other large images, or to use it as a noticeboard rather than for learning and teaching purposes.

  • Use images or logos sparingly in Topic 0. The larger any banner or image is, the more users must scroll every single time they need to access course content. This detracts from the usability of the site.
  • Consider adding logos or other branding to an HTML block at the side, rather than placing them in the main course column. Add links to the website associated with the branding to add value to displaying it on the page.
  • Avoid placing images inside tables, as this causes problems for vision-impaired users who use screen readers to access the course.
  • Don't use fixed-width tables, as they won’t adjust to different screen sizes.
  • Don’t crowd Topic 0 with items or text that students may only need to refer to once or twice during the course. Compile such occasional resources into a course guide within a single Book resource, as described below.

Provide a course guide

Include a “Getting started” or "Course guide" Book resource in Topic 0. It might contain the following chapters:

Maintain consistency and simplicity

  • Don’t use too many fonts or colours. Two font styles are adequate: one for headings and another for body text.
  • Give each section a short title by entering title text in the section summaries.
  • Don’t use long activity or resource names. These are hyperlinked names, not full descriptions. Place any further information in the item's Description or Introduction field, which displays when the item is accessed. If necessary, select Display description on course page, but if you do, keep the description short.
  • Include short labels to break up resources and activities lists and help users find things quickly.
  • Indent items below labels to indicate the hierarchy of information, but don’t overdo it. Too many levels of indenting can detract from the usability of the page.
  • Use images in section summaries to enhance your course page, but keep them small so that they don’t dominate the course page.
  • Don’t use tables in the section summaries to control the layout of images and text. Instead, edit your image settings in the following way:
    1. In the text editor, click the Insert/edit image icon (green tree).
    2. In the Insert/edit image window, click the Appearance tab and configure the options. (For example, at Alignment, select Left; at Horizontal space type "10" (or more). This will create left and right margins of 10 pixels. You will need the right margin if you are going to add another image to the right of the first one, but you do not need the left margin, so in the Style field delete "margin-left=10px;".)

Minimise content displayed on the course page

Always aim to minimise the quantity of content on the course page, or within individual sections, so that it’s easy to locate specific items and doesn't require students to endlessly scroll or to absorb long dense sections.

  • Treat the course page as a jumping-off point into resource and activity modules, rather than as a place to display lots of information.
  • Don’t use the course page to display lengthy blocks of texts within the section summaries or labels. For example, don’t include long introductions, summaries or instructions here.
  • Use Moodle resources such as Page, Book, File, Folder and URL to compile text, embed digital media, link to web pages or link to downloadable resources, instead of placing this content directly in section summaries or labels.

4. File management

There are advantages to placing all content that is uploaded into a course into the Moodle file manager (legacy course files). Initially it can seem like extra work to pre-plan your file naming conventions, set up a systematic folder structure and upload all your files before you need to use them. However, it will be a more efficient way of working in the longer term when you want to update files or link to the same document from multiple locations inside a course.

Please note that you cannot share files across courses. An individual legacy course files area is allocated separately to each course. See the guide for working with the legacy course files:

5. Template rollover considerations

The import process allows either selected items or an entire template site to be brought into a teaching course. Content will be merged and no pre-existing content in the destination teaching site will be overwritten or lost.

For information on importing templates into new courses, see the instructions on the following page of the Teaching Gateway:

Learn more
Find out more about designing, developing and administering Moodle courses on the Moodle support site: