Moodle Faculty Quickstart Guide

Welcome to the ultimate guide for getting started with Moodle at Lafayette College! This quick guide is designed to help teachers turn their classes into functional online learning spaces.

What is Moodle?

Moodle is a course management tool made by instructors to focus on student learning. It lets instructors easily set up interactive online spaces for their classes without needing to know how to build a webpage. With Moodle, you can upload your syllabus, host group discussions, turn in homework online, send emails to your whole class, take quizzes, and more.

Why might I use Moodle?

Consider using Moodle to:

Organize and deliver materials to students in your course (e.g., web links, resources, syllabi, short readings).
Capitalize on learning opportunities outside of class time. For example:
- Student review of class materials/content covered in class (e.g., PowerPoint presentations, short videos, lecture notes, short quizzes)
- Student preparation for the next class session
Encourage peer interaction and discussion
- Threaded discussion using Forums
- Peer-review of written assignments using Workshop
- Development of a class glossary
Manage class logistics
- Use “Announcements” to make important class announcements.
- Add the calendar block to highlight events, due dates, etc.
- Use Quickmail to email individuals or the entire class.
- Accept assignments online and choose to add them to the course gradebook.
- Use the Choice activity to allow students to pick research topics.
- Use the Feedback activity to solicit anonymous, mid-semester reviews from students.

How do I get started with Moodle?

Access your Moodle course site either through My Lafayette at my.lafayette.edu or moodle.lafayette.edu.
Click the course from the “My courses” tab. If you do not see your course, you can open the filter drop-down to select All, In Progress, Future, Past, Starred, or Hidden courses.
Select the “Edit mode” toggle in the upper right to begin editing the course site.
The sidebar on each course will help you stay oriented as you move throughout Moodle.

How do I change my course settings?

To edit your course settings, select the “Settings” tab at the top of your course page. You can change a number of settings about your course, such as:

Showing the course site to students since course sites are created hidden by default.
Including a course description.
Selecting the format of the course site (e.g., Grid, Weekly, Custom Sections, etc.).
Upload a cover image to be displayed in the Course Overview block

What types of Course Formats are available?

The course format will determine the basic layout of your course.

Grid format: a more visually focused layout, the Grid format allows a feature image for each section, selectable via a grid.
Custom Sections (the default course format) is not automatically labeled, and is not restricted to any time limit. The course is divided into customisable sections.
Weekly sections: organizes the content blocks in seven-day increments from the start date to the finish date of the course. Activities and Resources can be arranged according to the week.
Single activity (rarely used): oriented around a single activity, this format displays discussion topics as the central content of the course.
Social (rarely used): oriented around a single forum, this format displays discussion topics as the central content of the course.

How do I make my course available to students?

All Moodle course sites are created with their visibility set to “Hide” so the course will not appear on any course listings, except to teachers of the course and administrators.

To make your course site available to students:

Select the “Settings” tab from the main course page.
In the first section named “General”, change Course visibility from “Hide” to “Show.”
Click the [Save and display] button.

How do I add files?

Existing content can be added to your course by uploading files. Audio files, video files, PDF files, and Word documents are examples of files that can be uploaded to your course. You can move, rename, replace, or delete them.

Dragging and dropping files into Moodle

You can drag and drop your files directly into a Topic block on your course page by following these steps:

Select the “Edit mode” toggle in the upper right.
Locate the file you want to add on your computer and drag it into a section.
Be sure you see the “Drop files here” message appear in the section before releasing your mouse button.

Note: if your content resides on the Web, you can link directly to it using the URL Resource.

How do I add activities or resources?

Building a course involves adding course activity modules to the main page in a logical order. You can change the order any time you like.

Select the “Edit mode” toggle in the upper right.
To add a new activity, go to the section or week where you want to add the activity and click Add an activity or resource.
After adding your activities, you can move them around in your course layout by clicking and dragging the activity using the Move icon and dragging it to the topic block you want it in.
You can delete an activity or edit it by clicking the three vertical dots (vertical ellipses) to the right of it.

What are the standard Moodle activities?

Assignment

The assignment activity allows you to set a homework task, a due date, and a maximum score. Depending on how you set it up, students can upload a file to turn in their work. Moodle automatically records the exact date and time the student submits their file.

Afterward, you will get a single page where you can view every student’s file and see if it was turned in early or late. On that same page, you can grade their work and leave a comment. Half an hour after you enter a grade, Moodle will automatically send an email to that student to let them know.

Choice

A Choice activity is very simple – you ask a question and specify a choice of responses. Students can make their choice, and you have a report screen where you can see the results. It is ideal for quick polls and class votes.

Forum

This is the activity where online conversations happen. When you add a new forum, you can choose one of five different types: a single simple discussion, each person posts one discussion, a question-and-answer forum, a standard forum displayed in a blog-like format, or a standard forum for general use.

Under the Subscription and Tracking settings, you can turn the forum into an email list. This means whenever someone posts a message, Moodle will automatically email it to everyone who is signed up.

You can also choose to grade these forum discussions just like regular assignments.

For additional information, see Adding and Using Forums in Moodle.

Quiz

This activity lets you create and give quizzes. These can include multiple-choice, true-false, and short-answer questions. All your questions are saved in an organized database, so you can reuse them in different parts of your class or even in other courses. You can let students take a quiz more than once. Moodle automatically grades each try, and teachers can choose whether to show feedback or reveal the correct answers. This tool also includes built-in grading features to track student scores.