Title: 5.1 Gluing your course together
Course: Certificate in Online Education

Adding narrative to your course

It's very easy for your course homepage to simply become a long list of links to content and activities you have uploaded or created.

This soon become not only tedious for the student to have to click through links to find out what a particular topic is actually about, but it also makes your course look very dull.

It's a good idea to begin each topic of your course with a 2-3 sentence summary of what you'll cover in that topic. You can see we have done this for this course. You don't want to make these summaries too long, keep them short, clear and concise. Any longer than this and they probably deserve a page on their own (we'll discover how to create web pages in Moodle later on in the course).

In Moodle we use 'labels' for adding this course narrative. You can use the narrative to help build conceptual links between your course content, not just jumping from one topic to another. You may also hear this narrative referred to as course commentary or scaffolding for the course - essentially it is the glue that holds your course content together.

Adding labels

To add a label to your course:
1. Turn editing on
2. Select 'insert a label' from the 'add a resource' drop down list
3. Type the text you'd like to appear, you can use the options for formatting to create headings, links, lists etc

You can edit your label (or any other resources in Moodle) by simply clicking on the 'edit' icon:

You can also move your content, labels and activities around, by using the 'move' arrows:

 | Have a try adding labels to your course, also try going back to edit them and moving the labels around within your course.

Uploading images into your narrative

You can even upload images into your label (or any other field which uses the rich text editor).

Click on the image icon:

You can either select the image you'd like to use - you can use the built in file browser to see the files you have already uploaded to your course (no. 3), or you can upload a new file from your computer (no. 5).

Once you have selected the file (no. 3) you can preview the image (no. 4). Finally enter some 'alternative text' (no. 1), this is a textual description of the image and is needed in case the user has turned off images in their browser, or has a visual impairment.

Finally click on 'OK' (no. 2) and your image will be inserted into your label.

When you save the label and return to the course homepage, you can see the embedded image:

You can use the same method for uploading and inserting image to any field in Moodle which uses the rich text (HTML) editor, for example when creating a web page in Moodle