Setting Up Your Course
Setting up an online course in Moodle can be really rewarding as you have a great deal of control over how, what and where things appear to students. Here are a few things to think about.
Introductory Section
The first section in any Moodle course is the introductory section, This is where you should put your:
- syllabus
- guidelines and expectations
- Personal introduction
- Ice-breaker forum or other activity to let students get to know each other/establish your learning community
- Support info or other method (such as a forum for students with support questions) for students to get help
All Moodle classes also have what's called the "Announcements" forum. This is a one-way forum for instructors to send course updates to students. Messages posted by the instructor in this forum are automatically forwarded to students' email accounts. You can edit the name of this forum to give it a custom name.
Course Settings
In addition to activities and resources you post for your class, in Moodle you can also change the look and feel of the class in your course settings. This gives you a great deal of power to (among other things):
- Change from a weekly format to a topics or unit-based format. All Moodle courses default to the weekly format initially.
- Change the number of sections (modules) in your course.
Course Design
SQOCI Rubric
Shawnee College has adopted the Shawnee College Quality Online Course Initiative rubric to facilitate good practices when building online courses. The full rubric is included here for reference:
SCC Peer Review Checklist
You can also reference the shorter Peer Review Checklist. This rubric is a modified version of the SQOCI and is intended for faculty to use to evaluate each other's courses and to facilitate information sharing and course improvement: