Moodle Basics

1. Accessing Moodle
Type http://moodle.st-andrews.surrey.sch.uk in your web browser ad-
dress bar

2. Logging in
Use your normal school username
and password to login.

3. The Homepage
Clicking on your name
gives access to the
information stored in
your profile

My Courses
This section shows
you a list of the
courses you belong
to.

Calendar
Days with events are
highlighted in colour,
green for whole school
events, blue for
personal events, red for
course events and
yellow for group events.
 What can I do with Moodle?
(a) Upload Existing resources
Uploading resources makes them
available “Anytime, anywhere”.
Useful for those students who lose
their paper copies.

(b) Create DIY web pages or “interactive worksheets”

Moodle has simple tools so you can create simple
pages without having to have any technical skills.
Pages can be created using a Word-like text
editor or using HTML for the more advanced.

(c) Use “choices” or opinion polls

An opinion poll allows you to ask a question to the
students and collate their answers. This can be
used to gauge an opinion or test understanding or
to provide a talking point as to who chose what and
why.

(d) Use discussion forums

These are useful for encouraging participation from
“shy” students and for allowing students to ask
questions outside of class. You can also attach
files to posts for discussion or students can post
their work for peer review.

(e) Use Online Assignments and feedback

You can use Moodle to “collect” assignments.

Students upload their work to Moodle where you
can access it, read it and provide them with a grade
and feedback. You can even set a deadline for the
work students can only upload until that time.

(f) Upload ready-made VLE content

There are many providers of VLE content, Moodle allows you to upload this content to
your course easily.
...And much more, including quizzes, lessons, wikis, databases, glossaries...
 Setting up a course
Moodle allows a great deal of flexibility in setting up a course, however this does result in a lot of
options so this guide only covers the most often used options, to help you set up a course easily.
A lot of the settings can be left as the default option. More detailed information describing all the
options is available in the Moodle instructions booklet.

Click on the category in which you want to create your course

Click Add a new course

Give your course a Full name, a short name and write a summary for
your course (this will appear next to your course in the course listings)

Decide the format of your course - divide by weeks or topics or

have the course as a discussion area (social format).

Set the number of weeks/topics you wish to have (you can change this later) and
the date the course starts (it will hide the course from students until this date).

If you don’t want students to be able to enrol themselves on your course set
enrollable to no. Enrolment duration is the amount of time after which students
will be unenrolled.

Course Availability sets whether you want students to be able to access your
course yet. You can provide an enrolment key here which students will be
required to provide before they can self enrol in your course. You can also set the
level of guest access. We recommend you don’t allow guests without a key as this
opens your course and content up to anybody on the web.

Click Save Changes

You will be taken to the assign roles page where you can assign
other members of staff to teacher roles and manually enrol students
if you wish.
 Course Page Setup
Once you have set up your course you will have a page that looks something like the one
below.

This button turns editing on and off—this changes the

view from one similar to what students see to the one
below where you can add things.

The same page in editing view… This allows you to temporarily switch to a student
role so you can tell what your students can see
and do.

Use these to add Activities and Resources to your

course

Each of the items in the left and right hand column is

known as a Block, you can move blocks by clicking
and dragging them (or click on the arrows), delete
them or add blocks using the Blocks Block allowing
you to customise your course page further.

The following shows the function of some of the icons you will find on your course page
Edit/update section
Help
Item is visible to students (click to hide)
Item is hidden from students (click to show)
Outdent/indent item.
Move item (Click and drag)
Delete item
Makes that section current
Show only this topic/week
Show all sections
 Adding information to a course
REMEMBER:
To add things to courses you must first turn editing on.

To get a description of all the activities and resources available click on the help
symbol next to the drop down box.

Here are a few things you can do with the activities and resources available, these
are just a selection, much more is possible!

Resources
• To insert information and titles into the topic sections on
your course page use a label.
• For uploading word documents and other single files use
Link to a file or website.
• If you have lots of files you want students to be able to
access, e.g. lots of photographs, use display a directory.
• If you want to create a page with formatted text and
pictures and tables use compose a web page.
• If you just want a page to display plain text then use
compose a text page.

Activities
• If you want to provide a place where students can
upload work and you can grade it add an assignment.
• If you want to create a set of pages that students must
navigate in a certain order add a Lesson.
• If you have VLE content provided by a company add
SCORM/AICC
• If you wish to create a searchable directory of entries
about a topic (could be images/files/Web Addresses/
text) use a Database.
• If you wish to create a quiz containing different
question types that can be marked automatically add a
quiz.

The Survey activity allows you to choose between a

number of predefined surveys about E-learning, to set your
own survey question use the Choice activity.
 HTML editor
A html editor is often provided for you to enter text into. This allows you to format the text
similarly to as you would in word. Each of the icons tells you what it does if you hover
over it.

Switch to pure
html view
FontFont Text colour
Insert Link

Horizontal Insert picture Enlarge Editor into a

Rule Insert window of it’s own
table (provides additional
table options)

Insert Smileys

You can use this to create attractive looking pages and in the labels on your
main course page to make it attractive. The example below was created using
the HTML editor.
 Organising your course
Your course is broken down into weeks/topics, it is a good idea to use these sections
to help organise your course. Provide a short summary for each topic maybe detailing
a bit about the resources and activities included with the topic and then have the links
to the resources and activities. Try to keep each section fairly short so it is easy for the
students to see all the resources and activities without having to scroll past lots of text,
create new web pages/text pages for long sections of text.

Existing documentation such as your lesson plans or the course syllabus can be used
to organise your course and decide whether you want to set up your course in weeks
format - to fit with your lesson plans or topics format - to fit with the course syllabus.

If you have lots of files for a topic e.g. lots of photos you can link to a directory and
store all the files in the directory rather than linking each one to the course page.

You can organise your course files (i.e. the files you upload) by creating folders within
your course files directory and placing files in the relevant folders - this needs to be
done before you use the files anywhere as moving them after they’ve been linked to
breaks the link.
 Course Administration
Turn editing on allows you to add information, resources and
activities to your course page.

Settings lets you update/amend information you entered when

the course was created. E.g. you can change the course
description or name here, change the number of topics/weeks
your course page has or update your enrolment key.

Assign roles allows you to set manually enrol people in your

course or give teacher rights to a person.

Groups enables you to set up groups for the course.

Backup creates a backup of your course incase you need to

restore it, transfer your course material or wish to have a fresh
copy to load next time you run your course.

Restore allows you to restore information to a course using a Moodle backup. You can use
backups to transfer courses and import courses created on other installations of Moodle, e.g. the
Open University’s Open Learn site allows many of it’s courses to be downloaded in Moodle
Format which you can upload on to our Moodle site.

Import allows ways of transferring data in from other courses that you have editing rights on.

Reset allows you to strip a course of all user data while retaining all the activities and resources.
You have the choice of removing all postings in forums and all quiz attempts and setting a new
course start date. Removing user data in this way will cause it to be lost forever so create a
backup including user data if you think you might ever need to refer to any of the user data again.

Reports these show you the activity that has been going on in your course, you can get logs
based on the whole course, users, dates, activities, you can watch live logs from the past hour or
see a page which tells you how many times each of your activities/resources have been viewed.
These are very useful if you set an activity for homework to tell you who has looked at the activity
and when.

Questions this shows you the bank of questions you have created for quiz activities.

Scales here you can set custom scales for grading assignments or rating posts.

Files shows you the files you have uploaded to your course.

Grades shows you a list of your students with the grades they have achieved for any graded
activities you have set, grades can also be downloaded in to formats such as an excel
spreadsheet. If you have set groups up for any activity you will need to make sure the course
page settings doesn’t have group mode set to No else you will be shown one of your groups and
not have a dropdown box to change to the other groups grades.

Unenrol me from … This unenrols you from the course - best not to do if you are the one
teaching it!
 Setting up a Group
Moodle allows a teacher to assign teachers and students to specific groups. People can be
members of more than one group. Groups can be set at course level, where the groups by
default apply to all activities, or for individual activities.
There are three group modes:
• No groups. There are no sub groups, everyone is part of one big community.
• Separate groups. Each group can only see their own group, others are invisible.
• Visible groups. Each group works in their own group, but can also see other groups.
You can create groups by manually placing students into the desired groups or you can use
different enrolment keys to have students automatically moved into groups when they join
your course. This would be useful if you had two classes you were teaching the same
material to - you can give the classes different enrolment keys, set them to be two separate
groups and then students will only be able to see and interact with others in their class.

In the Administration menu click Groups

Click the Create Group button

Enter a name for your group and a group description. You can also enter a picture for
the group if you wish or hide the picture.

If you wish to have people automatically enrolled in certain groups when they enrol in the
course set an enrolment key for the group. You must have set an enrolment key for the
course, although this will not be used, the first letter of the course enrolment key is given if
the key is entered wrong, so it is a good idea to start your course enrolment key and your
group enrolment keys with the same letter

Click create group. Your group should appear in the left hand box of the groups page. Click
on your group and press the add/remove users button.

You now have two columns, the one on the left is the list of people assigned to that group
while the one on the right is everybody not assigned to that group who is enrolled in your
course. People can be assigned to more than one group so even if they are members of
another group people will appear here.

To add people to your group highlight them in the right hand list and press the left arrow to
move them into the group. You can highlight more than one person at a time by holding ctrl
while you click on the names or you can highlight everyone between two names by clicking
on the first name then holding down shift and clicking on the name between which you
want everybody to be highlighted.

Once you are done click on back to groups to get back to the list of groups

Repeat these steps until you have setup all your groups
Activities
 Setting up a Choice
Choices are small one question surveys/polls that allow you to pose a question to your
students and track the response. They offer lots of different options including:
• Deciding if/when you want students to be able to see the results; there are
options to let them see the current standings before they’ve selected an option,
after they’ve submitted their choice, after the choice closes or not at all.
• Whether you want the results to be anonymous to students or not (you will still
be able to see who has chosen what)
• Whether you want students to be able to change their minds and re-select their
choice.
• Whether you want to limit the number of people who can choose a certain option.
You can also download the result in formats such as an excel spreadsheet.

Turn editing on > Add an Activity > Choice

Write a name for your choice, and then fill in the body of your question in the
choice text section.

If you wish to limit the number of people who can respond to your choices set limit to
enable.

Enter your choice options in the boxes Choice 1, Choice 2, Choice 3 etc. If you set the
limit to enabled you need to set the limit you want to allow for each choice. If you wish
to have more than 5 options click the Add 3 fields to Form button to add three more.

If you wish to make everyone respond within a certain time frame tick the box next to
“restrict answering to this time period” and set the dates and times you wish the choice
to be available from and to.

Set the display mode to display the options either horizontally or vertically—if you only
have a few options horizontally is probably best, if you have lots of options then it may
be better to do it vertically.

You can then set the options for whether you want to publish the results for students,
and if you do whether you want them to be anonymous, whether you want your students
to be able to update their choice and if you want to be shown a list of students enrolled
in your course who have yet to choose.

You can then set the group settings if you wish.

Click Save settings and your choice is setup!

 Setting up a Forum
Forums allow online discussions to take place asynchronously i.e. a message is posted
and then is available for people to read and respond to as and when they can. Moodle
provides 4 different types of forum templates:
• A single simple discussion - this is one topic all on one page, for short
focussed discussions
• A standard forum - anyone can start a topic at any time - many topics co-exist.
This is the best general purpose forum.
• Each person posts one discussion - each person may post exactly one new
discussion which everyone can respond to.
• Q and A Forum - This forum requires students to post a response to a question
before they can see other people’s responses.

Turn editing on > Add an Activity > Forum

Enter a name for your forum, select which type of forum you want (see
descriptions above) and write an introduction for your forum e.g. on the types
of topics to be covered.

Choose whether you want to force everyone to be subscribed (will send email copies
of posts) and whether you want read tracking for the forum (will show whether you
have read a message or not), set the attachment size if necessary.

Set whether you want to allow posts to be rated. And if you do choose the rating scale
and whether you want it to be date restricted.

If you wish to restrict the number of messages a student can post in a given time set
the “time period for blocking” within which to count the number of postings and then set
the post threshold for blocking to the desired number and the post threshold for warn-
ing at which they will be warned. These can be changed later if you feel a few students
are dominating the discussions.

Set the group mode if you wish to have forums for your separate groups.

Click save changes and your forum will be set up.

 Setting up a Wiki

A wiki is a collaboratively authored document, i.e. a document which anyone can

add to or edit. It allows a set of web pages (similar to those you create through
the HTML editor) to be created and linked. Wikis allow you to track the changes
made, seeing who made changes and when, old versions are kept and may be
reviewed and re-instated if new versions are unsuitable.

Turn editing on > Add an Activity > Wiki

Give your wiki a name and enter a summary to describe the contents/
purpose of the wiki.

Select a Type - There are three different options for the type of wiki which deal with who is
able to edit the wiki(s). Teacher restricts editing to solely teachers, Groups allows all mem-
bers of a group to edit a wiki, while Student provides each student with a wiki which only
they and their teacher can edit. Combined with the No/Separate/Visible Groups setting this
leads to nine possibilities, to see a grid of these options click the help button next to the
Type option.

All the options with green asterisks are advanced options and can be left as their de-
fault values.

Set the groups mode if you want different groups. The groups mode allows you to
change the number of wikis produced/controls access to the wikis. As mentioned ear-
lier see the help icon next to the Type option for a list of how groups and types affect

Click Save Settings and your wiki is set up.

 Using a Wiki
Once you have set up your Wiki it will take you to the first page to start editing it.
You will see a HTML editor which you can use to write and format your page. Once
you are done you can push the preview button to preview your page and the save
button to save your page and update the wiki. This will then become the first page of
the wiki.

Adding a new page

To create a link to a new page enclose the text you would like to be the link in square
brackets i.e. [new page] when you then save the page the link will be displayed in bold
with a question mark next to it - this is now considered as a wanted page. Click on this
question mark to start editing the new page, once the new page has been edited and
saved the link becomes active and points to the page you have just created.

Editing an existing page

To edit an existing page click on the Edit button above the page you want to edit. This will
then show the page in the HTML editor where you can add information/make amendments.

Viewing the history of a page

Wikis allow you to keep track of the different versions of the page and who has edited the
page. To see this information click on the History tab above the page. It will then show you a
list of version with the person responsible for that version. You can click on the version num-
ber or browse to see that version, fetch-back allows you to edit the page from that particular
version and diff shows what was added/deleted in that version’s revision.

Wiki Administration Options

Set page flags - this allows you to set permissions for individual pages, e.g. if you wanted to
make a certain page Read Only (RO).
Strip pages - As the wiki automatically keeps all versions of a page after a while you might
wish to delete some of the older versions, strip pages will allow you to do this.
Revert Mass Changes - this allows you to undo any changes someone may have made -
i.e. if a user makes a mess of many pages in the wiki.
 Setting up a Quiz
The quiz module allows you to set quizzes for your students using multiple question
types, such as multiple choice, matching, essay questions or true or false. Questions
are stored in a question banks and can be used multiple times between quizzes. You
can allow students to have more than on attempt at a quiz and you can set the quiz
to adaptive mode, where the student is given a chance to re-answer any wrongly
answer questions usually incurring penalties for each wrong answer they give.

Creating a quiz happens in different parts, first you setup the quiz specifying how the
student will interact with the quiz, whether they’ll be able to make multiple attempts,
and what feedback they’ll get, then you add questions to your quiz, creating these
questions if you haven’t already.

Question Types

Moodle has the following different question types:

• Calculated - this allows individual numerical questions to be created
through the use of wildcards that are substituted with individual values
when the quiz is taken.
• Description - This is not actually a question it simple prints some text, and
possibly graphics without requiring an answer. This can be used to provide
some information to be used by a following group of questions for
example.
• Essay - the student answers a question in Essay style - these are not
marked automatically by Moodle - the teacher must grade these.
• Matching - A list of sub-questions is provided along with a list of answers,
the students must pick the right answer from the list.
• Embedded Answers (Cloze) - These questions consist of a passage of
text that has various answers embedded within it, including multiple
choice, short answers and numerical answers.
• Multiple Choice - the answer is selected from different options, there can
be one answer or multiple answers.
• Short Answer - the student has to enter a word or phrase - there can be
several different answers with different grades.
• Numerical - These are similar to short answer questions from the students
perspective but they are allowed to have an accepted error.
• Random Short-answer Matching - these are matching questions where
the questions and answers are drawn randomly from Short Answer
questions in the current category.
 Setting up the Quiz Settings

Turn Editing On > Add an Activity > Quiz

Enter a Name to identify your quiz and an introduction to your quiz.

You can then set the timing for your quiz - if you want it to open and/or close at a certain
time/date, if you want to set a time limit for your quiz and any time delay between attempts
you wish to impose.

You then set the display options, how many questions you want per page, whether you
want the question order to change (shuffle questions), and whether you want the answer
order to change (shuffle within questions).

Attempts gives you setting for limiting (or not) the amount of times a student takes the quiz,
setting Each Attempt Builds on the Last to yes allows students to see the results of their pre-
vious attempt at the quiz when they reattempt it. Enabling adaptive mode allows a student to
submit each question individually and reanswer any they get wrong within the same quiz at-
tempt, you can set penalties for wrong answers later.

Choose the grading method you want, and choose whether you want to apply penalties
for wrong answers in adaptive mode and change the display option for the results if you
wish.

You can change the settings for when students get to see their results, the correct an-
swers and any feedback by ticking/unticking the desired boxes.

You can set the quiz to be in a secure window if you want to limit what students can do
in the window - click the help icon next to the option to find out more. You can also enter
a password which students must enter before they can start the quiz.

You can then set the grade boundaries and feedback for within the grades - if you
require more divisions than there are boxes for click the add 3 fields to form button.

Click Save Changes. You will then be taken to the edit quiz screen where you can add
questions to your quiz and your question bank.
 Adding Questions to your Quiz from the Question Bank

You will automatically be taken to the quiz editing page after you have set your Quiz set-
tings. Alternatively you can access it by clicking on the quiz link from the course page
and then clicking on the edit tab.

You should now see 2 boxes, the right hand box is the question bank which lists all
the questions you have in your course, the left hand box is the questions you have in
that quiz.

To add questions to your quiz you select them in the right hand box by ticking the box next
to them then click the double left hand arrow to move them to your quiz.

You can then assign the questions grades or reorder them by clicking on the up and down
arrows (if you have set shuffle questions to yes then there is no need to order your ques-
tions)

Once you are done you can click on the Preview tab to see how your quiz will look when it is
run.

Adding Questions to the Question Bank

You can access the question bank either when you are editing a quiz (appears as right
hand block) or through the administration menu - click the Questions link.

Choose the category you want to add the questions to - or create a new one by click-
ing on the Edit Categories button.

Choose the type of question you want to create from the drop down list.

You can then fill in the add question page for whichever type of question you picked. Click
the blue question mark help icon next to the “Editing a … Question” for more help on the
type of question you have chosen.

Once you are done, save your question and it should appear in the question bank ready for
you to add to quizzes.
Cloze Questions

Cloze Questions have a special format that they have to be written in. This can seem
complicated at first. Cloze questions are usually embedded in a paragraph of text, there
are three different question types that you can choose from to embed, Multiple choice,
short answer and numerical questions. An example is given below:

The capital of France is {2:MULTICHOICE:Nice#Wrong~Marseille#No, that is

France’s Second biggest city~=Paris#Correct~%50%paris#A capital letter
should always be used for the beginning of Place names}
This displays as:

• The question must be enclosed between curly brackets.

• The number after the brackets is the weighting of the question.
• The question type is then enclosed in colons and must be in capitals i.e.
:MULTIPLECHOICE: or :SHORTANSWER: or :NUMERICAL:
• You can then enclose answers and feedback for each answer in the form an-
swer#feedback (feedback is optional)
• Separate answers with ~
• You can specify the answers that get marks by preceding them with percentages if
they are partially correct or = if they give full marks. E.g. %50%Answer gives the
user 50% of the full marks for that question, =Answer is equivalent to %100%
Answer
• You can specify an acceptable error range for numerical questions e.g. =23.8:0.2
will give full marks for anything from 23.6-24. You can also provide different marks
for different ranges e.g. =23.8:0.2#Correct, you get full marks~%50%
23.8:0.5#Close, half marks
• Short answer and numerical question answers are matched in the order you have
given, so if you wish to provide feedback for anything that doesn’t match any an-
swer you have specified you can use * to catch any other wrong answer and give
feedback for it so a numerical answer with a weighting of 2 could be written as:
{2:NUMERICAL:=10.5:0.1#Correct~%50%10.5:0.9#Close enough for half
marks~*#Incorrect}
 Setting up a Glossary
Glossaries act as dictionaries for the course, teachers/students can add words and their
meanings to the glossary. These entries can be searched or browsed in different formats and
set so that words in the glossary are automatically highlighted and linked to when used in
other parts of the course. Glossaries can also be imported and exported to and from other
courses.
Turn editing on > Add an activity > Glossary

Enter a name and description for your glossary and enter how many entries
to display per page.

You can then set whether you want it to be the main glossary (which only the teacher
can add to) or a secondary glossary (which students can edit then the entries be im-
ported to a main glossary).

You can then choose whether you want to allow duplicated entries, print view, whether
you want your glossary entries to be autolinked and whether you want students entries
to appear in the glossary immediately or whether you want to approve all entries before
they become visible to other course members.

You have a choice as to how your glossary is displayed, this is set using the Display
Format option. For definitions of all the types click on the help icon next to display for-
mat.

You then have the option to allow glossary entries to be related, either by the teacher
or the students, you can also pick the scale that is used to rate entries (this can be a
predefined one or one you have set using the scales option in the Administration block)

Click Save and your glossary will be set up - now you or your students can start adding
entries to it.

You can now add a new entry by

clicking on the “Add a new entry”
button.

You can create categories for

your new entries to come under
by clicking on the “Browse by
Category” tab and clicking the
“Edit Categories” button.
 Setting up an Assignment

The assignment activity allows you to set students assignments and then record
the grades they get for those assignments. There are different assignment
options, you can set assignments where students can get students to submit text
within Moodle (online text), upload one or more files (upload a single file/
advanced uploading of files) or you can set an offline assignment (offline activity)
- where the assignment and the grade can be recorded on Moodle but the
assignment is handed in/done offline.

Turn editing on > Add an Activity > Pick whichever assignment activity best suits
your needs.

Give your assignment a name and then fill in the description box with the details
of the assignment you wish the students to complete.

The grade option then denotes what scale you will use to grade the assignment, e.g.
you can choose the satisfactory scale, 100 if you want the grade to show as a per-
centage or choose the number of marks available e.g. 10).

You can then choose between which dates the submission period for the assignment is
and whether you want to prevent people from submitting work after this period has
ended.

The next group of settings are specific to the type of assignment you have chosen,
most are fairly self-explanatory, for further help with any of them click the blue help icon
next to the option.

Set the group mode if you wish.

Click Save and your assignment is setup.