A quick guide to Moodle

You can get to this site at any time during your study by clicking the  button which you will see in the bottom right hand corner of your screen.

All features of your course can be found by visiting the course homepage. The homepage gives you links to all your course resources and discussion forums. The current week will be highlighted so you can easily find the materials for that week. You can get back to the homepage from anywhere in your course by clicking on the title of your course in the top banner.

Menu drawer

On the course homepage, you can open the main menu by clicking on the tab at the far right of the course title bar. This will open the Menu drawer.

In this drawer you will find menus (or blocks) such as Navigation, Recent activity, Activities and Search forums. These provide quick access to the course content, recent postings, discussion topics and any subscription based resources that you can access while studying with us.

In the top banner, click on your name or picture to access your profile or preferences and log out of the course. How you update your profile and preferences differs depending on the type of course you’re on.

In your Profile and Preferences, you can…

• Share your photo.
• Add information about yourself.
• Change your password.
• Set your notifications for forum posts and other features.

Finding your Profile and Preferences works differently depending on the type of course you are taking.

Short online courses

Login to Portal and click on your name or picture in the top banner. This must be done from Portal. If you are already in the course when you want to make this change, use the link back to the Portal page from User details in your profile (see image below).

Award-bearing courses

Login to your course and click on your name or picture in the top banner.

Your Assignment details and submission pages are indicated by the  icon.  If your course has the Activities block click Assignments to see a list of all your assignments and their due dates. Click on a particular assignment to go to the details and submission page for that assignment.

Forums are places for you to communicate with your fellow students and tutors; they can be accessed through links in the content, from the Activities block or by clicking on the links next to the  icon.

If you want to join in a discussion, click on the discussion title to open it, then click on the Reply link under any post.

If you want to start a discussion on a new subject, click the button Add discussion topic at the top of the page. This will take you to a new page to enter your discussion topic. Click Post to forum when you have finished to post your message.

You can find a few useful tips to use forums below, or ror more detailed information on forums please go to the Discussion forums page.

Subscribe to a forum

Subscribing to a forum means you will be sent an email 30 minutes after somebody posts a message in that forum.

To subscribe to a discussion thread, in the Subscribe column on the forum overview page, click on the toggle so it turns red. Or from within the thread, use the settings option at the top right of the page and choose Subscribe to this discussion.

To subscribe to every thread in the forum you can click Subscribe to this forum from the forum overview page.

To change your notification settings for all forums, click on your profile picture or name following the instructions above, and choose Preferences, then Forum preferences. For example, you can set the Forum tracking option to Yes: highlight new posts for me to see how many new posts there are in each forum when you log in. There are also Notification preferences to set your email notification preferences.

Search forums

You can type a keyword in the text box on the forum overview page to search all the discussion forums for your course.

To see who else is studying the course, go to the course homepage and from the Navigation block, click Participants. You can also find your tutor’s email address by clicking to view their profile.