How to change the look of your course

Once logged into your Moodle course:

1. Click on the Gear icon at the top right of the course
2. Select Settings
   
3.  Scroll down to Course format, click to expand the section
4. . Using the drop down select which format you wish to use. 
   

If you changed your format, but do not like it, you can always come back an revert it back to the Topic's (default) format. 

Hidden Sections

This option determines whether hidden sections are shown to student in a collapsed form. 

To Hide a topic, have the editing turned on, and click the Edit button on the right of the topic you wish to hide and click Hide.

Number of Sections

The default number of Topic sections is 4. The limit is 52. The number can be increased from the course main page. 

1. Turn Editing on
2. Click the Add topics
3. Using the drop down menu to select how many topics you wish to add the click the button Add topics

Remove/Delete topics

Multiple topics can bee added at once, however they need to be deleted individually. 

To remove, have your editing turned on

1. Locate the topic you wish to delete, click the Edit button on the right
2. Click on the Delete topic
   1. This does delete everything inside the topic - if you need you can go to the Recycle Bin to restore items individually

Topics format (default)

The course page is organized into Topic sections that can be renamed to what makes the most sense for you and the students such as Week 1, Unit 1, Chapter 1, etc.. This option is most helpful in accessing the course through a device such as a smartphone or tablet. This will also allow you to re-organize them so the end of the semester is at the top of the course. 

 If you wish to rename the topic, with your editing turned on, click the pencil icon and when you are finished typing hit "enter" on the key board

Tiles Format

A course format which displays course topics as "Tiles", in a grid rather than as a list. When clicked, the tile content is displayed with an animated transition. The layout does adapt to the different screen sizes and orientations. With each tile, activities can also display as "Sub-tiles". For each tile, the instructor can pick an icon from a predefined set, or upload a background photo. 

From the Course settings page change the Course format to Tiles format, you will have the options to change the icon, color of tiles, ect..

Single Activity format

The single activity format requires the selection of one activity to be displayed in the course. For example, if using a SCORM package, frequently used in training programs, the single activity is useful. When selecting single activity, all other topic sections must be empty. A single activity must be selected.

From the Course settings page:

1. Change the Course format to Single activity format
2. Using your mouse, click on the Type of activity 
3. Click on the Activity you wish to use
   

Social Format

The social format option transforms the Moodle course into discussion forums only. You can select how many discussions to display. 

Collapsed Topics

The option to collapse the topics is helpful for student to gain control over how their Moodle page will look. Instead of a long scroll to topic sections toward the end of the semester, collapsed topics allows them to expand or collapse all or some of the sections. 

Here is a collapsed topic view from the course main page.

To change the course format to collapsed topics:

Weekly format    

This will use the default dates found in the section record (course main page - edit settings to see start date or class schedules inside portal) then for every topic you add (default = 4), it will auto populate the weeks in each of the topic headers.