Moodle Course Template Recommendations (2024)

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 circ*mstances where only a social discussion area is required.