Here are the primary course elements in a Moodle course shell:

In the border at the top of the page, you’ll find links for:

• Your Dashboard and My courses list where you’ll find links to courses and course activities.
• A pull-down menu with links to frequently requested guides and extensive Moodle How-To’s.
• A pull-down user menu for setting up your profile and adjusting your preferences.
• A toggle button for turning editing on and off.

Across the top of the page are links to key menus. These menus will also appear when you open an activity or resource in your course page. The options in these menus are contextual, based on the kind of activity or resource. On the main course page, the links include:

• Course — Displays the main course page.
• Settings — Includes links for making your course visible to students and adjusting the course format. The settings link in any item will take you to its set-up page.
• Participants — Lists everyone enrolled in the course. Here’s where you set up groups and check on enrollment.
• Grades — Takes you to the course gradebook. Here’s how to set up a gradebook for straight points and how to weight your grades.
• Reports — Contains links for activity logs, an activity completion report, and the “Dates” app that lets you update all of the due dates in your course in one screen.
• More — Provides links to important course functions such as the question bank, a content bank (repository of H5P activities), a recycle bin for restoring many deleted items, and reusing a prior course’s content (the course copy does not bring in student work submitted in the earlier course).

Directly beneath the SOU icon shown here in the upper left corner you’ll notice a gray icon that resembles a bulleted list. Click on that icon to open the course index and access all of the course activities and resources. The “expand” icon in the upper right corner pops out a series of “blocks” such as a course calendar, “Quickmail” messaging system, and other useful utilities. Clicking on those icons collapses the sections.