Title: 2.3 Creating your first course
Course: Certificate in Online Education

Creating a new course

Creating a new course in Moodle is very straightforward, watch the video below to see how it's done:

Once you have watched the video, go to your Moodle installation and create a new course for you to use to upload your content and activities into. You'll notice that on the course page there are lots of possible configuration options. We don't need to look at all of these in detail, but we'll cover some of the settings during the rest of this lesson. If you want to find out about the other settings, then use the Moodle help facility to learn more.

Course formats

As mentioned in the previous video, you can always go back to update the course settings after you have created it. This allows you (especially as a new user) to have a play around and test which options may be most suitable for you.

The first extra setting that we'll look at is the course format:

There are several different formats you may choose for your course, but the ones you are most likely to use are the topics and weekly formats.

The weekly format will divide your course into weeks, showing the dates when each section of the course should be studied:

If you don't want to split up your course into precise weeks, you can use the 'topics' format instead. This divides your course into numbered topics and so may be more flexible for you than the weekly format:

Next to the course format option, you can also change the number of topics or weeks that you'd like to show and (in the case of the weekly format) the start date for the course.

Remember that you can always return to change the course settings by selecting the 'settings' option from the course administration block:

You won't lose any of your content or activities if you change between topics and weekly formats. Try to change your course format to one of the other options. Which one do you think is most useful for you? Can you see why you may want to have different formats available?

Course visibility

Whilst you're in the process of writing your course, you may not want students to be able to access your course. Perhaps you want to wait until the course in finalised before you allow students (or anyone else) to access it.

This is where the course availability settings come in useful:

These are the options you may wish to set:

Availability: you can hide the course completely from students by selecting 'this course is not available to students'. Just remember to set it back to 'this course is available to students' once you've finished developing your course!

Enrolment Key: You can set a course password if you'd like to restrict who is able to enrol on your course.

Guest Access: here you can set whether you'll allow guests to enter your course or not. Guests will be able to read all the course content and activities, but hey won't be able to submit assignments, post forum comments or anything else that would require a non-anonymous user.

Tied to the course availability are the 'enrolments' settings:

Here you can decide whether students can self-enrol on your course. You may decide that you want to enrol the students on your course yourself and then set the course to be not enrolable. In which case no new students will be able to join your course unless you add them. You can also select when the course is open for enrolments.

Other course settings

There are other course settings which we have not had time to cover in this part of the course. You can find out more about these settings by clicking on the yellow 'help' icon next to the setting name.

As with many of the activities in Moodle, although there may be lots of settings available, the default settings are likely to be what you need, the defaults are sensibly chosen.

If you think you've made a mistake, then you always have the option of returning to this settings page - there´s nothing you can't undo!