How to navigate Moodle?

Moodle courses are built around a course home page. All other pages link from this – just click on an item to access it. You can use the back buttons to navigate back to the course homepage. The ‘breadcrumb trail’ in the coloured bar at the top shows you where you are in the course. You can click on this at any time to go back to the course homepage.

Some links are created to open in a separate window. Your course stays open in the background and the resource opens in a new window over the top. To go back to the main area of your course you close the resource with the red cross of the browser window in the top right-hand corner.

Alternatively, when you are looking at linked page you can use the 'Jump to' drop down menu at the top right of the screen to navigate to a particular section of the course.

© NSW DET 2010

Breadcrumb trail

Course homepage and section formatsMost course homepage formats are broken into course sections (often by week or topic). Topics or weeks are the most common types of section formats. If the weekly format is used the course start date will be shown.

Resources and activities are added to each section. Every resource or activity has its own uniquely distinguishable icon.

© NSW DET 2007

Topic outline

‘Jump to’ drop down menu

BlocksThere are a variety of ‘blocks’ on the course home page. Typically these blocks live on the left and right side of course pages, with the content or courseware in the middle. These blocks are intended to give you quick access to communication areas, tools and other Moodle functions.

Commonly used blocks include:

Courses People Administration Latest News.

For example, the ‘People block’ will show all the participants in a course. The ‘Resources block’ allows all students to see all the resources, while the ‘Assessment block’ makes it possible to access all of the assessments that students have to do.

Your course will include ‘sticky blocks’. These are blocks which the teacher/site administrator has set to always appear on course pages and/or on users' My Moodle pages.

Typical ‘sticky’ blocks include:

Latest News Messages People Upcoming Events Contact Information Course Information.

© NSW DET 2010

Blocks

Blocks

Using a menu blockThe ‘menu block’, usually located up on the top left-hand side of the course home page, allows a student to see the topic they are working on, or all topics at once. It also provides quick links to important tools including your profile, gradebook, etc.

© NSW DET 2007