Course Settings

Part of preparing your Moodle course for instruction means making sure you understand how different settings affect its appearance to your students. This lesson reviews some of these settings on the course settings page. It is not intended to be a comprehensive description of all the settings - just a summary of some of the most commonly used and most significant ones to most instructors.

Finding Your Course Settings

The link to course settings is in the Actions menu above your course outline.

Course actions menu

General settings

The first section of your course settings. In this section is both the long and short names for your course. (Students will need these to find your course in the Moodle course search.) The course category where your course is found is shown here as well.

The visibility status of your course can be toggled from this section. (Students cannot find courses that are set to "Hide.") The Course start date in this section is important for setting dates for sections within courses that use the "Weekly" format. It is set automatically by our student records server, but can be adjusted by the instructor. In the Weekly course format, the start date sets the date that the first week begins. adjusting the start date will adjust the dates of the weeks in the course outline.

Your course end date is set automatically by our student records server and in most cases does not need to be changed.

General course settings page detail

Course Format

The "Course Format" section of course settings will vary in length and options depending on which course format is chosen. The most common formats are "Weekly" and "Topics." It also set other aspects of how the course outline is displayed.

Course format section of settings page

Completion Tracking

If you plan to use restriction criteria to automatically open and close activities and resources in your course - as well as allowing students to track progress through the course using checklists - make sure this section's setting is set to "Yes."

Completion tracking field