Common Terminology

An activity in Moodle™ is any course content that requires a learner to share something with someone else in the course. This can include sharing something with the instructor, like submitting a Quiz attempt or Assignment, or sharing something with the class, like posting to a Forum or contributing to a Wiki. 

The Activities block helps both learners and instructors quickly find specific course activities and resources. This block lists the different activities available in your course, such as Assignments, Forums, and Quizzes. Clicking any link in this block will show you a filtered list of just that activity type in the course. For example: Clicking the Assignments link in the Activities block will take you to a filtered list of every Assignment in the course. If you're a student in the course, this page will include each instance of that activity type that's visible to you. If you're an instructor, this page will show all instances of that activity type in the course, even if it's hidden from students. 

The Announcements forum, sometimes called News Forum, is a special forum used for course announcements from an instructor. Only instructors can post to this forum. Any posts made here will also be delivered to your school email address.

This forum is automatically created for each course, every enrolled person is subscribed to it by default.

An assignment activity allows instructors to collect work from students, review it, and provide any combination of upload files, written feedback, and grades. The work students submit is only visible to the instructor, unless a group assignment has been enabled and the student is in a group.

The Attendance module is designed for faculty to be able to take attendance directly within their Moodle course. Students can view their own attendance record by clicking on the link to the Attendance module within a course, and a grade for your attendance may also appear within the gradebook. 

A visual reward that certifies a learner's accomplishment within a course. Badges are typically created and awarded by the instructor, but can also be created and awarded by a site administrator. 

The Calendar block is another useful tool because it can highlight important dates for you. Whenever an instructor sets an opening and due date on an assignment or quiz, those dates will appear as highlighted in the Calendar block. Hovering your cursor over that date, or clicking it, will display a list of activities that are opening or closing on that day.

The Feedback activity allows instructors to create and conduct surveys to collect feedback from students, which can be done anonymously.

A forum is an activity where students and the instructor can exchange ideas through posting questions and comments. A forum can contribute significantly to successful communication and community building in an online environment. There are different types of forums that an instructor can select, which will determine whether a discussion occurs all on one page or within different threads/topics. 

A user preference related to forums that allows users to track read and unread forum posts. This can be set at the profile level so read tracking is always enabled throughout your site, or manually within individual forums.