Welcome to the Spoken Tutorial on Formatting course material in Moodle.
In this tutorial, we will learn about: Resources in Moodle Adding additional course material Formatting options in the default text editor
This tutorial is recorded using: Ubuntu Linux OS 16.04 Apache, MariaDB and PHP obtained through XAMPP 5.6.30 Moodle 3.3 And Firefox web browser You may use any web browser of your choice.
However, Internet Explorer should be avoided, as it causes some display inconsistencies.
This tutorial assumes that your site administrator has set up a Moodle website and registered you as a teacher.
Learners of this tutorial should have a teacher login on Moodle at least one course assigned to them by the administrator some course material uploaded for their respective course
If not, please refer to the relevant Moodle tutorials on this website.
Switch to the browser and open your Moodle site.
Login with your teacher username and password details.
We are now in the teacher dashboard.
In the navigation menu on the left, notice Calculus under My Courses.
Click on the Calculus course.
We have already added announcements and some common course details earlier.
We will now add some additional course material.
All course material in Moodle are called Resources. These are material that a teacher uses to support learning.
Resources could be internal like lecture notes, books or external like Wikipedia links
Let’s begin. Click on the gear icon at the top right of the page and then on Turn Editing On.
Note you need to turn the editing on to make any changes to the course.
Click on Add an activity or resource link at the bottom right of the Basic Calculus section.
A pop-up opens with a list of resources.
Scroll down and select Page from the list. Read the detailed description about the resource on the right side when you select any resource.
Click on the Add button at the bottom of the pop-up screen.
In the Name field, I will type Lecture 1 Notes.
Then in the Description box, type “Involutes and construction of Involute of circle”.
Check the option Display description on course page.
Scroll down to see the Page Content box. Copy and paste the text from BasicCalculus-Involutes.odt file.
We will be uploading the image at a later stage. This file is available in the Code Files link of this tutorial.
Let us now format this text. Click on the down-arrow at the top left of the editor to expand the menu widgets.
I will make the headings more prominent, as shown.
The options in the text editor are similar to any other standard text editor. Here we can see options like Bold, Italics, Unordered and Ordered lists.
We also see options to hyperlink and unlink a text.
There’s an option to add an image, as well. Let us add an image after the text “Figure 1 shows the involute of a circle”.
Press Enter to make space for the image. Then click on the Image icon.
The Image properties window appears. If you want to insert an external image, you can enter the URL of the image here.
I will click on Browse Repositories button to upload an image.
A pop-up window opens with the title File Picker.
Click on Upload a file. Then click on Choose File or Browse button and select the file from your machine.
This image is also available in the Code Files link. You can download and use it.
Click on Upload this file button.
We will type the description as “This is the involute of a circle”.
Lastly, click on Save image button to insert the image.
The next option is to add media. This could be a URL, video or audio file. Again, this can be an external URL or can be uploaded from our machine.
The next option is Manage Files. Let’s click on it.
Manage Files option is to have a set of files that you want to store and display. This could include assignment submissions, resource files, etc.
They can be used by any other resource in this course. Notice that the image we uploaded just now, is also present here.
There are 3 icons on the left of this pop-up box.
First is the File picker. Let’s click on it.
It has options to see the server files, recent files, etc. Server files are the files which have been used elsewhere in the course and can be reused.
I will close this for now by clicking on the X icon.
Next, we will click on Create Folder icon, which is the second icon.
In the New folder name field, let’s type Assignments.
Then click on the Assignments folder to open it.
Let me drag my file inside the Assignments folder.
Now, click on the file that that was just uploaded.
This pop-up has the option to modify the file name and author. And also to download or delete the file.
I don’t wish to change anything. So I will click on the Cancel button at the bottom of the pop-up.
Now, pause the tutorial and do this small assignment: Create a folder Reference Material. Ensure that the folder is inside the Files folder and not inside the subfolder Assignments.
Upload the 3 files. You will find them in the Code files link of this tutorial.
Resume this tutorial after you complete this assignment.
Your File manager should now have 2 folders, named Assignments and Reference Material.
And another file named involutes-img1.png
Close the pop-up window by clicking on the X icon at the top right.
The next set of formatting options are Underline, Strikethrough, Subscript and Superscript.
Align and indent options follow these. These work as in any other text editor.
Let’s learn how to use the next option, that is the equation editor.
I want to add this sentence with an equation in it. So I will click on equation editor icon. Then use the equation editor to type the equation.
Details about how to use LaTeX to type equations, are in Additional Reading Material link. Click on Save equation button when you have finished.
Insert character, insert table and clear formatting options, work as in any other text editor.
The next two options are Undo and Redo. These get enabled, only when there is some unsaved text.
After this, we have 2 options for accessibility. The first icon is called Accessibility checker. The 2nd one is screen reader helper.
Details about accessible websites and these options, are in Additional Reading Material link.
The last option is to toggle from the editor view to HTML code view.This can be used to embed images, videos, PPT, interactive content, etc.
Click on toggle HTML again. This will bring us back to the normal editor view.
I have formatted the text using the bold, italics and list options for this demonstration.Do likewise for your content.
When you finish the formatting, scroll down to the bottom and click on Save and display button.
We can now logout of Moodle.
This is how student Priya Sinha will view this page.
With this, we come to the end of this tutorial. Let us summarize.
In this tutorial, we learnt about: Resources in Moodle Adding course material Formatting options in the default text editor
Here is another assignment for you. Add a new folder resource in Basic Calculus Add the reference files from the File Manager Refer to the Assignment link of this tutorial for details.
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This script has been contributed by Nancy and Priyanka.And this is Nancy Varkey along with the Spoken Tutorial team signing off.
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