Moodle Design Tips

Choose a Layout

The main choice of layouts is between a weekly and a topic layout. The weekly layout is the most popular, but if your course splits neatly into four or five themes, then you might prefer the topic layout. (For example, a philosophy course could have Plato as the first topic, Aristotle as the second and so on.)

Choose a Theme

If you do not change the theme on the Settings page, your course will have whatever is the default theme on that server. The default theme will not look bad, but it will make your course look like every other Moodle course. Here are two examples of how different you can make your page look using themes:

Note that both of these courses use custom themes (“goban” and “matrixcode”) that I created by adapting existing Moodle themes. If you fancy playing around with graphics and CSS and want to create your own custom theme, then get in touch with the Moodle admins.

Go Easy on the Fonts

It's best to let the theme choose the fonts. If you chose a font yourself, stick to one font, in one or two colours, and not too many sizes. As with any kind of publishing, don't overuse bold, italics or capitals. And never, ever use MS Comic Sans Serif!

Use Graphics — Sparingly

Images are a great way to make your Moodle course more eye-catching, thus attracting and hopefully keeping students' interest. On the other hand, they can make your course look a mess. You really don't want big images on the main page, so scale images down to around 300px wide.

A nice trick is to embed a small image in the description of each week to create an effect like this:

To get the text flowing round the images like this, you need to insert some raw HTML. Click the edit button for the course description and add your text and image as normal. then click the <> button which takes you into HTML mode. Anywhere inside the img tag (the bit that starts <img), insert style="float: right;".

Think About Blocks

You don't need to stick to the course blocks in the template. Have a look at the Blocks menu and add blocks you need. In particular, note the HTML block, which is a free-form block you can fill with text or images as you will, and the “Embed web page” block, which allows you to embed external content in Moodle. On the other hand, if neither you nor your students use a block, delete it; too many blocks will make the page look cluttered and confusing.

Don't Use Moodle as a Dumping Ground

It's tempting to put everything on Moodle—links, lecture notes, exercises, the kitchen sink—but like everything else, dont overdo it, or you'll end up with a crowded, confusing page. Remember that if you have a lot of files you want students to see, you can create a directory (folder), upload your files, then put a link to the directory. If students don't need to see files, then hide them, or keep them somewhere other than Moodle.

Hide

Don't give the students everything at once. Even if you have your whole Moodle course written before the semester starts, hide anything you don't want students to look at immediately, then unhide it when you come to use it. It's a matter of aesthetic and pedagogical taste; I generally show previous weeks, the current week and the week ahead, and hide anything after that.