Moodle® For Dummies®

Adding RSS to Your Course

I know you have been itching to learn how to add a newsfeed to your course and to finally understand what RSS stands for so you can impress all your friends. RSS is a geeky term standing for Really Simple Syndication (also referred to as Web feed, feed, or channel). What this means is that when you subscribe to a site on the Internet, the news is brought to you so that you spend less time looking for updated information in blogs, e-zines, news headlines, audio, or video. The short summary in the RSS includes publishing dates and a link to the source.

“Fantastic,” I hear you thinking! Before I take you through the steps on how to add it to your course, I need to give you a little more information.

Moodle enables you to bring feeds (information) to various activities in Moodle. You can use RSS with

• Forums
• Glossaries
• Databases
• The course front page (blocks)

For you to be able to use RSS, it needs to be enabled in the Administration block in the Server subsection. If you don't have administrative privileges, ask your system administrator to enable it. It will also have to be enabled in the Forum activity. When you're making this request, ask the administrator to enable administrative and teacher submitters in the Blocks section. If you need instructions on how to make these changes, see Chapter 13, which provides a brief rundown on many of the Moodle administrative tasks.

Including RSS on the course front page

The RSS feeds block allows you to bring feeds ...