1.1.2 Select course format
| Site: | WMO Education and Training Programme |
| Course: | Calmet Moodle Unit 1 - Design an effective learning environment |
| Book: | 1.1.2 Select course format |
| Printed by: | Guest user |
| Date: | Thursday, 18 April 2024, 7:01 AM |
Description
How to set-up a course in weekly format
1. Introduction
A course format refers to the layout of a course. The course format can be selected in Administration > Course administration > Edit settings.
An administrator can enable, disable or delete course formats for courses in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Course formats > Manage course formats. They can also change the order in which available course formats are displayed to teachers in the course settings.
2. Example
Below is an example from Eumetsat of the weekly course format.
In this example each week is renamed to Lesson 1, Lesson 2 etc.
3. Instruction
Standard Course Formats
There are several formats available in the standard Moodle setup and more are available as plugins from the moodle.org plugins.
Weekly Format
If your course is organized week by week, with a clear start date and a finish date, Moodle will create a section for each week of your course. You can add content, forums, quizzes, and so on in the section for each week.
- TIP: If you want all your students to work on the same materials at the same time, this would be a good format to choose.
- NOTE: Make sure your course start date is correct. If it is not your weeks will have the wrong date on it. This is especially important if you are restoring a course to use with a new section of students.
Topics Format
If your course is objective based and each objective may take different amounts of time to complete then the Topics Format is ideal. An example of this would be scaffolding where the students are building upon the knowledge from earlier topics.
The course is organised into topic sections which can be titled by a teacher. Each topic section consists of activities, resources and labels.
Social Format
This format is oriented around one main forum, the social forum, which appears listed on the main page. It is useful for situations that are more free form. They may not even be courses. The Moodle Lounge is an example of a social format course.
The next few sub-chapters describe the different course formats in more detail.
Setting the Course Format
The following video shows how to set up a course in Weekly Format.
The following video shows how to set up a course in Topics Format.
Standard Formats - Social format
This format is oriented around one main forum, the social forum, which appears listed on the main page. It is useful for situations that are more free form. They may not even be courses. The Moodle Lounge is an example of a social format course.
The social forum can be edited by clicking the 'Update this forum' button on the social forum page. The forum introduction is displayed at the top of the course page. Activities and resources can be added on side utilising the Social activities block.
Contributed Course Formats - Collapsed Topics
This is a format that is essentially the same as the standard Topic and Weekly formats but with a 'toggle' for each section except '0'. The toggles' purpose is to reduce the amount of initial information presented to the user thus reducing the 'scroll of death' that can plague courses with a lot of content. The 'state' of the toggles is remembered on a per course per user basis. For more information, please visit Collapsed_Topics_course_format.
Overview
For an overview of 'Collapsed Topics' please see this video:
Contributed Course Formats - Miscellaneous
Daily format
The daily format is a modification of the weekly format that shows sections by day rather than by week.
Grid format
The grid format is a modular and visual course format. Hides all topics and creates a grid of icons (one for each topic) with short titles. Clicking on an icon brings up the content from the corresponding topic in a "lightbox" style display.
Menutopic format
The menutopic format allows you to display the topics/sections in a menu.
Noticeboard format
The Noticeboard format presents the latest post in the news forum at the top of the course.
Onetopic format
The onetopic format shows each topic in a tab, keeping the current tab between calls to resources, in such a way that when it returns from a module as the blog or the glossary it returns to tab from where you started. This format is based on the Moodle standard format: “Topics”.
Topic format (colors)
The colored topic format is based on the 'Topics' standard format and allows a teacher to specify the foreground and background colours for each course section.
Flexible sections format
The flexible sections format for Moodle 2.4+ allows to have nested sections and each section may be displayed expanded (with all content on the parent section page) or collapsed (as a link to a separate page)
Other contributed course formats are available from the modules and plugins database.
4. Practice
Now go to your own practice area and try