Moodle® For Dummies®

Managing Your Course Data and Staying Up-to-Date

After creating content, uploading it to your course, setting up various activities, and getting your course running successfully, you may feel very pleased with yourself. Well done. But you have more to do: Now you need to be able to handle the updates and maintenance of your course. One of the most important aspects of keeping your learners engaged is keeping your course current by updating your files, deleting old files, and linking to new sites.

Learners are tech savvy: They can download a document and view the date when it was last updated. Recently, one of my students told me how grateful she was that I kept the course fresh and interesting. She told me that one of her online courses had material dated 2003, broken links to sites that did not exist, and a recycled syllabus dated 2000. She learned all of this within the first week of the course, and she withdrew from the course and demanded her money back. Rightly so!

Moodle has added tools in the course Administration block to help you manage and keep your files updated. To view the Files tools, go to your course front page, locate the Administration block (by default, Moodle displays it on the left side, as shown in Figure 14-1), and click the Files link.

Figure 14-1: The Admini-stration block on the course front page.

Moodle then takes you to the Files editing page, shown ...