THE UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH The new Moodle landing page Introducing the course filter Moodle Help Materials Compiled by the Web Services Team webservices@gre.ac.uk Last updated: 06/09/2012
Filtering courses To enable easier management of courses across multiple academic years, some changes have been introduced to the Moodle landing page. 1) The search box has been relocated to the top of the page 2) A new My Courses filter has been introduced to the Moodle homepage. All users can filter their courses by year (please note: courses without a start date set will appear under other in the Year drop-down box). Sorting by category (department) and course leader is also possible (these are totally optional and do not need to be changed in order for the year filter to work). Upon loading, the course filter will default to the current academic year, but will save user choices between sessions. 3) Users have the ability to hide any course that they do not need to access frequently from their homepage by clicking on the eye symbol next to the course name. Settings are saved between sessions. 4) Users are told how many courses are currently hidden, and can use the manage hidden courses link to add courses back to their homepage. 1. 2. 4. 3. 2
Adding the course filter manually If you have ever customised your My Home page (even in a training session), then the course filter may not display automatically. If the middle column (content area) of your My Home page is empty, then you will need to add the My courses course filter block. This will only need to be done once. 1. Click on Customise this page (this will turn on editing for the My Home page) 2. From the Add a block menu, select My Courses. The course filter block will then be added to the right-hand column of your My Home page. You will need to configure the My Courses block to make sure that it allows you to sort your courses, then you will need to move it to the middle of the page. 3. When the block has been added, click on the edit icon. 4. From the configuration options: Tick Allow courses to be filtered by category, Allow courses to be filtered by teacher and Allow courses to be filtered by start date. 3
Set the start of the academic year to August, then tick Set the filter to the most recent year by default (as shown above). Scroll down to the bottom of the page and save your changes. 5. An image with drop-down menus for filtering will then appear in the block. You will now need to move it to the middle column so that it displays correctly. 6. Click on the move icon. The screen will refresh showing you all of the available spaces that you can move the block to. 7. Select the middle column by clicking in the dotted area. When you click between the dotted lines, the move will complete and you will see your course filter in full. Showing and hiding courses A course can be hidden from your course list at any time by clicking on the open eye icon to the right of a course name to close it. This allows you to hide courses that you do not need to access regularly from your course list. If you click on an open eye icon, the course will immediately disappear from your list, and the number of hidden courses just under the course filter will increase. To show any of your hidden courses again, click on Manage hidden courses and click on the closed eye symbol next to the course name to re-open it. To return to your normal My home page, click Stop managing hidden courses 4
This area tells you how many courses are currently hidden from view Click an open eye icon to hide a course A plus sign denotes more information about a course, e.g. assignments due shortly click to show. A minus sign allows you to collapse this extra information to save space. Click to return to My Home page Click an open eye icon to hide a course Click a closed eye icon to show a course You may have some courses (e.g. non-banner training courses, or Programmes that run across more than one year), that fall outside the recognised start dates; anything that does not filter into the correct year can be found by selecting All or Other from the drop-down menu in the course filter. 5