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Tutorial
Moodle Primer Part 2: Administering a Course
10/10/2007
Fig. 2: The Outline view with editing on and callouts added. Click to enlarge image.
With editing on, you can add new items as you did when creating the course (both resources and activities). More importantly, though, you can also change the existing items as illustrated by the icons. Since the icons are not nearly as intuitive as they could be, I've added callouts and will discuss the key ones, referencing each by its callout:
A: This allows you to hide the entire week/topic. This can be useful if you find that you just have too much material and decide not to use it this time, or you don't want students jumping ahead. If the latter is the case, you can hide it now and unhide it when you do want them to focus on it.
B: The entire week/topic can be moved. If you get behind--think snow days, server outages, and the like--and need to move the assignments from here down, simply click the arrow icon and move the material around.
C: This tool isn't nearly as powerful as the others here but is handy. The indent tool allows you to move the listing left or right. As you look at the figure, you'll notice that beneath each label, I've indented the resources and activities for that week. It doesn't change a thing, but is aesthetically appealing.
D: Instead of moving an entire week or topic's worth of material from one to another, you can move just this item. When you click the icon, the entire outline changes with placeholders appearing throughout, and you simply choose which one you want to move the item to.
E: This takes you into editing mode for the individual item and is useful for correcting those spelling errors, link mistakes, and so on.
F: When you come to the realization that this item just isn't as important as you thought it was, you can choose to delete it.
G: Just as you can hide an entire week/topic (callout A), you can do the same for the individual resource or activity.
Once you use these features a few times, their meaning will become familiar to you, and you'll be able to make changes quickly and simply.
Changing Quiz Items
One of the biggest issues that will arise will be with quiz questions. Students will come up with answers that you never considered, and you must decide how you want to handle it.
As the course progresses, the best way to keep track of progress is by clicking on the Grades option beneath Administration. This will bring up a display similar to that shown in Fig. 3. (Note: the names of the students would appear on the right and left but have been grayed out in the figure to protect their privacy).
After adding it as a possibility, go to the Results page for the quiz, shown in Fig. 7, and click Regrade. This will start from scratch and regrade each quiz that has already been taken and come up with a new score based upon which answers are now right and wrong. (Theoretically, you could go the other way and take out some of the answers that were previously graded as correct, if you needed to).
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