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Course Overview – Navigating Moodle 3.1

By Domi C Sinclair, on 21 September 2016

Over the summer we upgraded Moodle to the latest stable version, which brought a number of new feature, many of which you can read about in our Moodle Resource Centre wiki New Features section.

One of the biggest changes, which has caused some concern, is the new Moodle Course Overview block which fills the centre of the My Home page in Moodle (what you see when you first log in).

Therefore I’d like to take some time to explain a bit more about how this block works, you can also find some guidance from the external Moodle HQ in the Moodle Docs for Course overview block.

As well as listing courses, as the My Courses block previously did, this new block also offers an overview of activities on your course which may need attention, including Moodle Assignments, Turnitin Assignments, SCORM packages and forums.  If these have pending activities then they will display a message saying ‘You have ‘x’ [activity name]s that need attention’.

If you click where it says that it will expand to show details of what the activity is and what actions may be required:

  • For Moodle Assignments this notice should only show for students if there is a submission (or re-submission) required and for tutors/ course admins if grading is required.
  • With the Forum this notification will display until you have accessed the forum, and until you have logged out and then logged in again – so it will display until you next log in to Moodle.
  • For Turnitin and SCORM activities the notification is a little different, as it will always display the activity but by clicking it you can confirm if the required submission/ grading has taken place.

Please note this lack of clarity in language and information displayed has been communicated to Moodle and we are watching their future releases to see when this will be made clearer.

The Navigation block on the right-hand side still features a ‘My courses’ list, which shows all the courses you are enrolled on in a much more compact way. This may be a better navigation tool than the Course overview, which can be limited in how many courses it displays. Alternatively you might also want to use the search box located above the Course overview block.

Hopefully this explains it a little better. If you still have any questions then please contact the ISD Service Desk.

 

2 Responses to “Course Overview – Navigating Moodle 3.1”

  • 1
    IOE_ITServices wrote on 22 September 2016:

    RT @UCLDigiEd: Course Overview – Navigating Moodle 3.1: Over the summer we upgraded Moodle to the lat… https://t.co/rz5EBhsnxp

  • 2
    Kerala wrote on 3 October 2016:

    Navigation moodle is pretty cool

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