Creating and Managing Courses

Unlike the course fullname, the course shortname must be unique in your site. While you can have multiple courses with a fullname of English 110 on your site, you can only have one course with the shortname "English 110". We recommend not including spaces or commas in shortnames to prevent problems with enrollments and some plugins. Many clients will codify and serialize the shortname to prevent duplicates when multiple sections of the same course are offered. For example, if Section A of English 110 begins in August of 2021, and this is the formula for creating course shortnames:

Then applying this formula we create:

The course shortname is displayed in the site navigation, including the breadcrumb links within the course, and is used in the subject line of emails sent through the course, or triggered by course activities. The fullname is displayed at the top of each page in the course, and in your users' list of courses. 

Do you want teachers to have a new course shell every year?

YES: Append a year and/or term code to the course shortname and/or full name. We recommend setting a start date for the course so the teacher can easily switch between topics and weekly format, and to improve accuracy in reporting. Lastly, we recommend that if you include an end date that you consider what will be most helpful as it relates to the course overview block. Keep in mind that the end date doesn't prevent access to the courses, it just impacts its availability in certain places like the navigation drawer and the Course Overview block on the Dashboard. You cannot set an end date if you're using the weekly format because courses with weekly format will automatically assign an end date based on the course duration set in the course default settings.

NO: You may get requests for this later as teachers want to preserve past course activity for their records.

Do you want the option to bulk enroll users in their courses?

YES: Include a unique Course ID in the settings of the course. This could be the same as the course shortname or something different like a unique number. This is the ID used for flat-file enrollment, and requires a column in the CSV for "idnumber". We recommend not including spaces or commas in the Course ID to prevent problems with enrollments.

NO: No need for a Course ID, but it's easy enough to include one as you're creating courses in the event you change your mind.

Does the category you wish to add courses to already exist?

YES: Identify the category number so it can be used in the file. An easy way to get this number is to navigate to the category page and look at the URL in your browser. It should end in something that looks like: moodle.myschool.edu/course/index.php?categoryid=2 -- use the categoryid number in the spreadsheet.

NO: Add the category first then come back to this question to answer Yes, and locate the categoryid number using the directions above.