The great thing about my PLN (Personal Learning Network) on Twitter is that I not only find out lots of things, but I also get to answer questions for other people, which also increases my own knowledge by having to find an answer.
One person from my PLN asked if I knew how to make course creation on Moodle easier. Being a course creator on a Moodle site means you can (obviously) create new courses, but for whatever reason Moodle has made the process tricky. To create a new course, the creator has to follow a less defined path through their already created courses to find a button that says “Create new course”
Are you still following?
So they asked “How can I make it so that the course creator can find the “Create a new course” button more easily?”
I did some research in the Moodle forums, and discovered how to do it!
Moodle is arranged in hierachical fashion. Categories are ways to help people find courses more easily. The default setting for categories in Moodle is Miscellaneous. What most people seem to do is create their courses inside this category. When the course creation permission is given to people, the problem I mentioned before occurs (ie. the difficulty in finding the course creation button)
One solution is to create new categories. In a school categories may be things like “Maths”, “English”, “Science” and other subject areas. Then, give the course creators permissions for the categories (not the courses). When these people then log in, and go to the category that they work in, they will see the “Create new course” button at the bottom of the category page. Simple!
They only issue I found was they are allowed to create and work on courses in all categories, but as these people would most likely be trusted and reliable people, you could assume they would probably only work in their intended category anyway. Who knows, it may produce cross curricular collaboration!
If, like me, you already created courses under Miscellaneous, you can still go ahead and create your new categories, and then move your existing courses into them without any problems. Just go through the “Add/Edit courses” menu on the Site Administration area, then look for Categories. Click on Miscellaneous and you’ll see all your courses. Look for the “Move selected courses” menu box. Select the courses that need to be moved, and then select their new destination.
Video of the week – very clever, and a great song
As the person who asked this question, I cannot thank you enough. Another example of how powerful twitter can be for sourcing answers. Look forward to fixing this up and having our moodle 100% ready for staff and students come day 1 next term
PLNs are the answer IMHO! Any teacher who is actively putting one together is advantaging their students.