Moodle® For Dummies®

Understanding and Implementing Moodle Conventions

Moodle uses specific conventions, icons, and fill-in fields throughout all its tools and features. The most common and oft-used of these conventions — the Moodle Help system and the settings for resources and activities — are ones that you may want to continue to reference, so I discuss those here. When you become a regular Moodler, these will become second nature. Developers of Moodle have kept to the same layouts for every version, which makes you quickly fall in love with it, knowing that after you learn a way of doing things, it won't be changed — thank you, development team!

Moodle Help system

Wherever you see the help icon, you can click it to open a small help window defining or briefly explaining the term or functionality.

Resources and activities settings

Each of the setup pages for all activities and resources has several groups, each containing any number of steps, always ordered in the same sequence. The following sections summarize the settings and explain some of the conventions. You see these setup pages when you set up a resource, such as linking to a file, or an activity like a forum discussion or a quiz.

General settings

The General settings are shown in Figure 3-12. Each setup page requires you to enter a name in the field, a summary (which I recommend because the summary is listed in a table when learners access ...