How do I Customize my Course Settings?

Course Settings

Course settings control how the things appear to the participants in a course. It is the first page viewed after creating a course. It can be edited through the settinss link on the Adminstraton block menu or Control Panel/Edit course settings in the Course Menu Block.

Do not edit the first four options: Category, Full name, Short name, and  ID number. These fields are tied to ITS automatic updates and enrollment processes.

Summary
The summary of the course is displayed in the course listings. Keep your course summary brief - one to three sentences long.

Format
A Moodle course may use one of the following three formats:

• Weekly format
  The course is organised week by week, with a clear start date and a finish date. Each week consists of activities. Some of them, like journals, may have "open windows" of, say, two weeks after which they become unavailable.
• Topics format
  Very similar to the weekly format, except that each "week" is called a topic. A "topic" is not restricted to any time limit. You don't need to specify any dates.
• 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 freeform. They may not even be courses. For example, it could be used as a departmental notice board.

Course start date
If you are using a 'weekly' course format, this will affect the display of the weeks. The first week will start on the date you set here.

This setting will not affect courses using the 'social' or 'topics' formats. However, one place this setting will have an effect is the display of logs, which use this date as the earliest possible date you can display.

In general, if your course does have a real starting date then it makes sense to set this date to that, no matter what course formats you are using.

Enrolment duration
This setting specifies the number of days a student can be enrolled in this course (starting from the moment they enroll). Leave the "unlimited" default.

Number of weeks/topics
This setting is only used by the 'weekly' and 'topics' course formats.
In the 'weekly' format, it specifies the number of weeks that the course will run for, starting from the course starting date. In the 'topics' format, it specifies the number of topics in the course.

Both of these translate to the number of "boxes" down the middle of the course page.

Group mode
Here you can define the group mode at the course level. This will be the default group mode for all activities defined within that course. Learn more about Groups

Note that you don't need to change this setting to enable groups. The default setting of this and 'Force' enables each activity to have its group mode set individually.

Force
If the group mode is "forced" at a course-level, then this particular group mode will be applied to every activity in that course. Individual group settings in each activity are then ignored.

This is useful when, for example, one wants to set up a course for a number of completely separate cohorts.

Availability
This option allows you to "hide" your course completely. It will not appear on any course listings, except to teachers of the course and administrators. Even if students try to access the course URL directly, they will not be allowed to enter.

Enrolment key
A course enrolment key enables access to courses to be restricted to those who are officially registered and automatically enrolled in the course shell or know the key.

If left blank, then anyone who has created a Moodle username on the site will be able to enrol in the course.

If a key is specified, then students who are trying to enter for the first time will be asked to supply the key.

The idea is that Teachers supply the key to authorised people using another means like private email, snail mail, on the phone or even verbally in a face to face class.

Guest access
You have the choice of allowing "guests" into your course or not, and if they need an enrolment key or enter without one.

• People can attempt to log in as guests using the "Login as a guest" button on the course login screen.
• Guests ALWAYS have "read-only" access - meaning they can't leave any posts or otherwise mess up the course for real students. No use information is stored for a guest.
• This can be handy when you want to let a colleague in to look around at your work, or to let students see a course before they have decided to enrol.
• Note that you have a choice between two types of guest access: with the enrolment key or without. If you choose to allow guests who have the key, then the guest will need to provide the current enrolment key EVERY TIME they log in (unlike students who only need to do it once). This lets you restrict your guests. If you choose to allow guests without a key, then anyone can get straight into your course.

Hidden sections
This option allows you to decide how the hidden sections in your course are displayed to students. By default, a small area is shown (in collapsed form, usually gray) to indicate where the hidden section is, though they still can not actually see the hidden activities and texts. This is particularly useful in the Weekly format, so that non-class weeks are clear.

If you choose, these can be completely hidden, so that students don't even know sections of the course are hidden.

News items to show
A special forum called "News" appears in the "weekly" and "topics" course formats. It's a good place to post notices for all students to see. (By default, all students are subscribed to this forum, and will receive your notices by email.)

• This setting determines how many recent items appear on your course home page, in a news box down the right-hand side.
• If you set it to "0 news items" then the news box won't even appear.

Show grades
Many of the activities allow grades to be set. By default, the results of all grades within the course can be seen in the Grades page, available from the main course page.

If a teacher is not interested in using grades in a course, or just wants to hide grades from students, then they can disable the display of grades with this option. This does not prevent individual activities from using or setting grades, it just disables the results being displayed to students.

Show activity reports
Activity reports are available for each participant that show their activity in the current course as well as listings of their contributions. These reports include detailed  logs, but also create a substantial load on the server while being generated. For Large or long classes it may be more efficient to keep it off.  Your course screen may freeze in the process of creating logs. 

Maximum upload size
This setting defines the largest size of file that can be uploaded by students in this course, limited by the site wide setting created by the administrator.

It is possible to further restrict this size through settings within each activity module.

Your word for Teacher/Teachers/Student/Students
You can change the words for teacher and student for a particular course.

Force language
If you force a language in a course, the interface of Moodle in this course will be in this particular language, even if a student has selected a different preferred language in his/her personal profile.

Is this a meta course?
A metacourse automatically enrols its participants from other courses. For example, for every course that is a "child" of the metacourse, all students in the child course are enroled in the metacourse.

Retrieved from "http://docs.moodle.org/en/Course_settings"

TIP

Finally use the contextual help files (click on the yellow circle with a question mark) to access information about any of the settings dropdown box options.