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.