Hi this is Russell Stannard from teacher training videos.com this video was gonna be about Moodle
it's about designing Moodle I'm gonna just show you a couple of tips and how you can make your
Moodle courses look a lot more professional what I'm gonna do is I'm going to draw on some real
courses that I've produced and show you examples and these couple of tips will really help you to
make your courses clearer easier to navigate and look a lot more professional now hopefully you're
watching these videos either on Facebook or on YouTube so if you've got any questions please
leave questions and comments in the comment section below and if you can please like the
videos as well and thank you very much one of the biggest problems with designing courses
in Moodle is that you off the way end up with loads and loads of links so if we for example
look at this section of the course we can see here there's masses and masses of links now
we could have added a description I was obviously trying to exaggerate a little bit how it works but
you can see the point that there's really nothing visual on the screen now I want to contrast that
with just a simple example here of a course that I've run or I created for an organisation called
quality language services and here immediately you can see that we've got a nice title we've got some
text and then we got some visual elements on the screen so we can simply change it so that actually
the access in the content doesn't require you all always to click on the link but rather some
of the content might actually be directly on the screen and I'm going to focus on two simple
techniques that I use to make that possible let's get straight into it so if we look at this course
here there's one obvious thing that we could do immediately that would improve this if we was to
come up here onto the section where the title is and just simply click on edit and click on
the edit section and what we're gonna do here is just take away the default title come down
underneath and I'm just gonna grab a picture so I'm gonna click here and then I'm gonna sort of
prepare browse my repositories in fact I should be able to find this image here in recent images
so I'm just gonna click on this image and then I'm going to select that file and click on save
image now immediately that means that there's kind of think now at the top of the screen so
instead of it just been loads and loads of links I've actually added up an image okay now what I'm
also going to do is just click on that image and just bring that into the center so by using the
kind of text align tool I can do that click on Save Changes and immediately now that's going to
mean is the top of that section has at least a title that would be a good idea as well to
actually add some description underneath so I can easily go back to that title okay click again on
add section and just underneath in our stop the video from you so I'll just come back again and
added in some text and I'm doing a little trick here where I kind of use in Moodle you normally
have very specific sizes that you can use medium heading and I like use nice because it means that
everything is consistent so I've already used medium head in here and I'm going to use it
here so all I've done really is just put you know added some text underneath and hopefully this will
start to look a little bit more professional okay so instead of just Navin having those loads and
links now we kind of got something visual on the screen now what's the problem here let me try to
explain what the problem here the problem here is the use of labels and that's what I want to focus
on next now the problem with Moodle when you add what we call either activities or resources here
okay so if we click on this button here and we add a lot of these resources or buttons sorry
resources or activities the result of that is that they create a link and sometimes you don't
want that now it's impossible to avoid not having links on the page there are certainly going to be
times when you're going to need links but you may want to visualize things on the screen rather than
always just have links so what you can see at the moment here is that these are all links so
these are various things like for example we've got here you know chats and of course pages etc
but the one that will actually visualize on the screen so will actually appear on the screen
rather than simply be a link is if we use a label and I'm going to demonstrate that by clicking here
and add a label so I'm going to come down to label I'm going to add a label onto the screen
and immediately you'll see that labels work in a different way because when you click on add
a label it immediately says well what content you want on that label so immediately when you create
a label and you place the content in that content is visualized now the label could include video it
could include pictures etc now I'm going to add up some video content because it might be nice
after or at the top of the unit to have a quick video explanation of what is going to happen in
this particular unit of the course now I'm going to show you a couple of tricks in with the labels
all right so the first thing I'm going to do here is write video introduction so we're going to have
a video introduction onto the screen I'm going to do the same thing as I did earlier select that and
I'm gonna use this consistent idea of making sure that everything is medium heading I'm gonna paste
some text near so I've just copied some text I'm just gonna paste that text in and then underneath
that text I'm now gonna add a video so I'm gonna click here remember anything that we do in this
format will actually appear on the screen now this is not gonna look very good at the moment
because we need to do quite a lot of work to tidy up the whole unit but hopefully it'll give you a
bit of an idea of what I mean so now we've got a kind of title and we've got a video and we're
just gonna save that now and once we say that we'll be able to see what that starts to look
like on the screens I'm just going to click here and see what we have produced now coming
to this particular section we've now got a kind of label here at the top which we use by editing
what I call what was basically the actual title section at the top and then the first content
we've added onto the screen now is actually in the form of a label with an explanation and in
a video underneath now of course all these labels are still here unfortunately and we need to tidy
those up there could be lots of different tricks and that's really another video but I'm going to
just show you one simple thing that you could do that would help to make this look a little
bit more professional so what I'm gonna do just gonna switch back to my principal role because
I'm logged in now as a participant to actually just look and see what that was gonna look like
I'm gonna come down here and just show you a quick improvement that you could make to this course so
you need to turn the editor back on again and we're going to add a label again and I'm just
gonna show a little trick that we can do here and I'm gonna come to labels and I will come down here
choose label click on ads and simply I'm going to put here chat okay so I'm just going to put
here chat okay and then I'm gonna select that and choose again to make that consistent so I'm going
to use the medium and say this is the chat to the unit on distribution okay I'm gonna save that as
a label remember that's gonna be visualized on the screen this is just a simple technique that
could improve the way your course looks now if I move that up to here okay and put that underneath
whatever section it's meant to mean we've got the chat here in fact so it won't put the chat
underneath and what you can immediately see is that I could begin to do that to every section
so I could have a label plus the link a label plus the link a label plus a link and we could
begin to add more and more labels to make the content look a bit more organized okay so rather
than simply just having a link we've now got a quick discreet I title plus a description then
the link title so I would add more and more labels and that would immediately tidy this up and make
it look a visually more appealing now those were just two really simple techniques that I'm using
there one is how you can go to the actual what you might call the section header at the top of each
section of your course and edit that and adding an image there because that will also visualize
on the screen and then the other thing I've done is that I began to use labels to visualize some
of the content on the screen and by doing that you begin to create a bit of a valance and you
don't always have masses and masses of links and then the third thing that I've suggested is where
you have got links add a label above each link with a title with a description always using the
same size and eventually you'll make that course look a lot more attractive visually easier and
clearer to navigate I hope you found that video useful if you were accessed it on Facebook or on
YouTube as I said please leave any calm whence any questions and if you can like the video if
you want more content in a good place to come is to teacher training videos calm there's a
whole section here a free content at the top including lots more videos on using Moodle
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