Moodle Course Template Recommendations

From T1 2023, faculties started implementing the Moodle Enhance theme and layout template.This is to ensure consistency of key information and navigation for students across their courses at UNSW. The Moodle Enhance theme and template have been customised to meet the needs of UNSW Moodle users through an iterative co-design process driven by students and staff feedback across all UNSW faculties. The outcome is a modernised and simplified experience for online learning and teaching using Moodle. Please see the Introducing Moodle Enhance page or Moodle Course Home Page for more information.

Please contact your faculty education support team for more assistance with your faculty template.

When to use

Consider these recommendations when designing or updating your course.

Benefits

The guidelines will help you to design and implement consistent, user friendly, and easy to navigate Moodle courses. They include information on course format, selecting blocks, course layout and style options, and on importing templates into new courses.

Template guidelines

1. Course page format

As mentioned above, from T1 2023, UNSW started implementing the Moodle Enhance theme and layout template. This Moodle Enhance format uses collapsed topics, which provides the best flexibility and simplicity of design. Please contact your faculty education support team for more assistance with your faculty Moodle Enhance template.

This table gives pros and cons of common Moodle formats.

Format

Advantages

Disadvantages

Recommendations

Collapsed Topic
  • Students have more control over what they see.
  • Simplifies course page.
  • Reduces clutter in courses that have a lot of topics or multiple activities and resources.
  • Can still be used with either a week or topic structure, with activities and resources only visible if sections are toggled open.
  • Can be arranged to show Latest week first or Current topic first..
  • Inappropriate choice of section colours and fonts can affect accessibility.
  • Individual sections, once opened, can still suffer from the same issues as other formats and appear text heavy, crowded and too long unless deliberately designed with recommended strategies outlined in the course design guidelines below.

Use colours that are accessible to colour-blind users and that have high contrast. Dark text on a light background (e.g. a black font on grey topics) is recommended, rather than light on dark, which is harder to read.

See WCAG 2.0 Guideline 1.4.1 Use of Color

Use the course design guidelines below to add images that break up the heavy text-based look and feel of the course page. Use recommended strategies to minimise the amount of text and the number of items that display on the course page.

Regarding choice of section colours, In Moodle Enhance format, which also uses Collapsed Topics, a carefully considered selection of colours are available. Also, one colour can be applied to the hubs (General Course Resources Hub / Assessments Hub) and another colour to the course content sections.

Topic
  • Useful for scaffolding learning where one topic builds on another
  • Useful for separating resources and activities into types, e.g. Resources, Lectures, Assignments, Quizzes
  • This is the simplest format to use, with minimal setup required other than giving each topic a name.
  • Without a course timeline students can become confused about what they should be working on and how to stay on track.
  • The course page can look very text heavy.
  • The course page can quickly become content heavy, requiring a lot of scrolling. Students may find it hard to navigate and find items.

Using a Moodle “Page” resource, create a course map or matrix (table) with a weekly timeframe.

From this map, link to each relevant resource or activity in the course.

Use the Calendar block to add Group or Course events.

Adding closing dates to course activities —assignments, quizzes etc.— will cause them to display in the Calendar block as course events.

Use the course design guidelines below to add images that break up the heavy text-based look and feel of the course page. Use recommended strategies to minimise the amount of text and the number of items that display on the course page.

Weekly
  • Activities and resources are organised by week.
  • Provides a start and finish date for each section of activities and resources, which helps students stay on track
  • Useful in courses where students work on the same materials at the same time
  • Particularly relevant for fully online courses where students need to maintain regular participation
  • Activities can become lost inside weekly sections full of long lists of resources.
  • Course start date must be edited each semester.
  • The course page can look very text heavy.
  • The course page can quickly become content heavy requiring a lot of scrolling. Students may find it hard to navigate and find items.

 

Use the Activities block to enable students to quickly access all the activity modules inside the course.

Make sure your course start date in the Edit settings page is correct: if it is not, your weeks will have the wrong dates.

In the course settings, allow for the mid-semester study break when entering the number of weeks required.

Use the course design guidelines below to add images that break up the heavy text-based look and feel of the course page. Use recommended strategies to minimise the amount of text and the number of items that display on the course page.

Grid

Grid format is not currently readable by JAWS screen reading software for visually impaired students.

Staff are advised not to use this format for new courses, and to reformat existing Grid format courses using Topics or Weekly format.

Please see the Known Issues page.
  • Modular and visual format
  • Useful for discrete topics where no sequence is necessary
  • Images bring colour to the course and create a much more attractive course page than other course formats' text-based appearance.
  • Not a mobile device friendly layout
  • Difficult to structure learning pathways
  • Requires much more effort to set up
  • Images used must be the correct size (210 pixels wide by 140 pixels high); they can’t be resized after uploading into the grid.
  • Images must be copyright free, or accompanied by a copyright notice or attribution notice.
  • Individual sections, once opened, can suffer from the same issues as other formats and appear text heavy, crowded and too long unless deliberately designed according to the guidelines below.

Don’t put too many resources or activities into Topic 0 (the course summary section) when using the grid format. It makes the page look unbalanced and pushes the grid images too far down the page.

Use the course design guidelines below to add images that break up the heavy text-based look and feel of the course page. Use the recommended strategies to minimise the amount of text and the number of items that display on the course page.

Social

The entire course becomes one big forum that displays on the course page.
  • No other activity or resource modules can be added to the course
  • Does not provide the capabilities of a regular forum activity module used for learning and teaching purposes
  • Has limited value as a course format

Not recommended as a course format but may be useful in circumstances where only a social discussion area is required.

2. Blocks

Use the blocks section of your course home page to enhance your course template with important information or convenient functionality. Be selective about which blocks you incorporate into your template and remove any block that does not add value. The Moodle Enhance template includes a Teaching Contact block (using a Text block) in the top most position. Your faculty template may have additional blocks as well. There are numerous other blocks to choose from but blocks will provide useful functionality only if they are directly relevant to your course's learning and teaching strategies. The following list contains only a few examples of the most common or useful blocks. 

Find out more about blocks on the Block Drawer page.

Blocks can be easily rearranged into a different order but it is recommended you keep the Teaching Contact block in the top most position.

Activities

This block provides quick links to all course resources or activities. Each resource or activity link in this block leads to a summary page displaying all content created using that resource or activity type.

Completion Progress

Completion progress is a block that allows academics to display activity completion tasks as a visual progress bar. Please note that this block is also included in the Moodle Enhance template but it requires configuration to be useful. This block is commonly used to:

  • provide academics with an additional progress bar-themed activity completion report.
  • provide students with improved tracking and navigation to activity completion tasks.
  • separate related completion tasks into multiple completion progress blocks.

See Configure the Completion Progress Block for instructions.

Latest announcements

  • This block displays posts from the Announcements forum.

See Moodle Announcement Forums for instructions.

3. Course layout and style guidelines

Quick Links (section 0) considerations

The Moodle Enhance Quick Links section (section 0) occupies prime screen real estate at the top of the course page. Resist the temptation to fill it up. The recommended maximum number of items visible to students is 10. Additional hidden items can be included for staff only but again, try to have only a few really key items. For instructions, see Set up the Quick Links on Moodle Course Home Page.

Course Outline

In 2023, UNSW commenced implementation of an Enterprise Course Outline System (ECOS) for all UNSW courses. A link to your course outline (as part of the faculty Moodle template) will be placed in Quick Links. For more information, see the ECOS Support Hub. If your faculty is not yet using ECOS, your faculty education support team can provide more information on your course outline link in Moodle.

Key course information

Moodle Enhance includes two hubs where students can easily access key information. These locations will be consistent across all courses.

1. General Course Resources Hub - (section 1) Among other general course resources, this section is meant to deliver in a centralised way:

  • Getting started information
  • General course materials
  • Communication channels
  • Course evaluation, including institutional surveys

A “Getting Started” book resource is strongly recommended. It might contain the following chapters:

  • Welcome Message/Course Introduction - text and/or a video giving a course overview, outlining expectations about student participation and providing instructor contact details
  • Navigation and Course Structure - how the course is structured and how this is aligned in Moodle sections (e.g. weekly or topics organisation, essential and optional tasks, activity completion requirements, etc.) 
  • Referencing - the style used in the course (and why)
  • Group Work - how and why groups are used in this course. A useful UNSW link to include is Guide to Group Work.
  • Technology in this course - for any specific technologies required for this course and how students can access them. A useful UNSW link may be myAccess - Applications Anywhere Anytime.
  • Time Management - to outline workloads, especially when there is both in person and online components of the course. A useful UNSW link is Time Management.

2. Assessments Hub - (section 2) This standard section is meant to deliver in a centralised way:

  • Summary table of assessments
  • Links to grades and special consideration information
  • Assessment briefs and submission tools. If your submission boxes are better placed in line with the (e.g. weekly) learning content or in independent sections, make sure that instructions and, if desired, hyperlinks to them are available in this Assessments Hub.

For more on Moodle Enhance, see Introducing Moodle Enhance.

Maintain consistency and simplicity

  • Don’t use too many fonts or colours. Two font styles are adequate: one for headings and another for body text.
  • Give each section a short title (topic related where possible) and include the Week number and start date.
  • Don’t use long activity or resource names. These are hyperlinked names, not full descriptions. Place any further information in the item's Description field, which displays when the item is accessed. If necessary, select Display description on course page, but if you do, keep the description short.
  • Include subheadings in labels to break up resources and activities lists and help users find things quickly.
  • Indent items below subheadings to indicate the hierarchy of information, but don’t overdo it. Too many levels of indenting can detract from the usability of the page.
  • Use images to enhance your course page, but keep them small so that they don’t dominate the course page. See Adding images and media on Moodle Text Editors for instructions.
  • Don’t use tables to control the layout of images and text - this is not very accessible to those who need to use screen readers. See Formatting with Grids and Tables on Moodle Text Editors for instructions.

Minimise content displayed on the course page

Always aim to minimise the quantity of content on the course page, or within individual sections, so that it’s easy to locate specific items and doesn't require students to endlessly scroll or to absorb long dense sections.

  • Treat the course page as a jumping-off point into resource and activity modules, rather than as a place to display lots of information.
  • Don’t use the course page to display lengthy blocks of texts within the section summaries or labels. For example, don’t include long introductions, summaries or instructions here.
  • Use Moodle resources such as Page, Book, File, Folder and URL to compile text, embed digital media, link to web pages or link to downloadable resources, instead of placing this content directly in section summaries or labels.

4. Template rollover considerations

The import process allows either selected items or an entire template site to be brought into a teaching course (including the Moodle Enhance template). Content will be merged and no pre-existing content in the destination teaching site will be overwritten or lost. For information on importing templates into new courses, see the instructions on the following page of the Teaching Gateway:

You can also contact your faculty's Education Support team.

Learn more
Find out more about designing, developing and administering Moodle courses on the Moodle support site: