A Student’s Guide to Moodle

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How to Log in to Moodle

1. Go to Moodle web site provided by your teacher/facilitator. 2. Click the “Login” link. 3. Your username and password are the same as your email. 4. You are now logged in! You should see a list of your courses in the “My courses” box on the left. The box will not show up if you are not enrolled in any courses.

If you get a log in error, please double-check your password and log in name with your email. If they work in email but not in Moodle, or don’t work in email either, contact the Helpdesk to reset your password.

How to Find your Courses

If you are enrolled in any courses already, they should appear in the “My Courses” box on the left side of the Moodle main page when you log in. If you aren’t enrolled and should be, you can talk to the teacher/facilitator.

How to remove yourself from a course

To unenroll yourself from a course, go to the course’s Moodle site by clicking its link on your Moodle main page. Go down to the “Administration” block, usually on the bottom left side of the course’s main page. Click the link that says “Unenroll me from code for the course.” You’ll be asked “Are you sure you want to unenroll yourself from this course?” Click “Yes.” Remember, you cannot re-enroll unless the teacher does it him or herself.

How to email students in the course

Click on the “Compose Email” link in the Quickmail block, and you will get a window with a checkbox next to the name of each member of the course. In addition, there is a “Check all” button and any course groups will also each have their own “Check all” option. There is a space for typing the subject line of the email, titled “Subject,” and a larger field for the actual message body, titled “Message.” When the email is finished, click “Send email” to send it.

The Quickmail block is not enabled in all courses by default; your teacher may have to turn it on.

Your Profile

Your profile is your identity on Moodle. All Moodle users can see it, including your facilitators. Your profile also contains email information and your ID number. Be aware that Moodle is the means by which your instructors will be contacting you about assignments and other class matters.

To edit your profile

To view your profile, click on your name next to the “Logout” link at the top of the screen, or anywhere else that your name appears as a link. Then, click the “Edit profile” tab. From moodle.org: There are several settings that are accessible from your profile that will help make your use of Moodle more productive.

• Email format: You can choose to have emails sent from Moodle in Plain text format or Pretty HTML format. HTML format will include images and the Moodle colour scheme in emails, but will be slightly larger in size.
• Forum auto-subscribe: If you select yes for this it will mean that when you post a message to a forum, you will be subscribed to that forum and receive email copies of all messages for that forum. You may unsubscribe from forums if you wish as well.
• Email digest type: You may choose to receive all emails from Moodle in one daily message. There is also the option to receive either the complete message or just the Subjects from forums you subscribe to.
• Forum tracking: This is a useful option to enable. If it is enabled on your Moodle site it will highlight unread forum messages so you can easily see what is new.

You can also change your user icon by browsing for a picture next to the “New Picture” field. Please keep the picture small, about 100×100 pixels, and 500kb or less in size. Please use either GIF or JPG format. Again, remember that this profile is accessible to all members of the learning community, and your teachers will see this icon. The same caution is applicable to your description.

Forums

If your teacher has put a forum in your course, the link on the main page will look like this:

  Forum name goes here

To post a new thread in a forum, click the link, then click the “Add a new discussion topic” button at the top of the list of threads. Give the thread a title in the “Subject” heading, and type your post in the “Message” section. When you are done, check your post for errors and click the “Post to forum” button at the bottom. Be sure to change the Subscription setting to how you want it—if you want to receive emails of every post to the forum, set it to “Send me email copies of posts to this forum.” If not, set it to “I don’t want email copies of posts to this forum.” Some teachers may have set their forums to force you to be subscribed or to not allow you to be subscribed, in which cases this option will not appear. After you’ve posted, you will have 30 minutes to edit your post.

To reply to a thread, click on the name of the thread in the forum, and click the “Reply” link at the bottom right of the post you want to reply to. The fields are the same as they are for making a new thread.

You can change whether you’re subscribed to a given forum at any time by clicking on the name of the forum, then clicking the “Subscribe/Unsubscribe me from this forum” link in the top right of the window.

Some teachers will use groups. If you want to see the forum posts for a particular group, select the group name from the drop-down menu that will appear on the forum’s page. Depending on how the teacher has set it, you may be able to see only posts made by members of your own group.

If you want to know anything more about Moodle, try looking it up at Moodling Education?.