Moodle

Often when a course has a lot of content, students and teachers find the long scrolling tedious and would prefer a ‘neater’ appearance with hyperlinks to sections in a similar way to the way pages on websites work.

• See Course formats for a way to show only one section per page.

• Anchors/section links can help. But the course page can still be long.
• Hiding the activities shortens the list for students, but then they can not be selected by students.

One method which might be useful is to put the activities into sections which are then made ‘unseen’ to the student.

Basic Example

• Set the number of topics in the course setting to 1 more than students will see.
  • For example, you plan on the students being able to see 6 topics, set it for 7.
• Add activities in topic 7, such as a quiz (in our example)
• Get the url of your quiz
  • Copy it and keep it somewhere (such as notepad) for later use
• Go back to course admin>settings and change your topic/weeks to 6
  • Or one fewer than you had before
• The section with your quiz will no longer be on the page that the student sees
• In another section, make a hyperlink to the quiz using its url
  • You can also put it in a topic summary, label or
  • as a resource (link to a file or website)

You will find that the quiz is accessible to students even though the section does not physically appear on the course page for the students. You have shortened the page.

More advanced example

• There is a youtube video that gives an example of how to do this hereThe video is of a Moodle 1.9 course but the principle still applies.
• You can actually set up your whole course using this method.
• Set your course to have two topics (or more if you wish)
• Ignore topic 1 – do not place anything in it.
• In topic 2, use the resource: Page to make pages relating to your units of work/topics
• Add all your resources to topic 2
• Copy the resources urls into the relevant webpage as hyperlinks
• In topic 0, the course summary make hyperlinks -or better- images hyperlinked – to each webpage which contains the activities of that unit/topic
• Go back to course settings and set the number of visible topics to 1.

The teacher will see the hidden sections as “orphaned” items on their course page. However; the student will only see the top of the page. When they click on a link in the header, they are taken to the hidden webpage resources, where they select the resource or activity they wish. This creates a very short visual page but keeps all the course material within the course.