Student & Course Handbook

Getting Around eLearning

Your profile, dashboard, courses, resources, activities, grading, completion, and backups — all in one place.

Tap any section below to expand it. Tap again to collapse.

1 User Profile

You can access your profile from the user menu at the top right of the screen.

Profile menu location

It's where you see your name and an arrow. Click the arrow to open up the menu.

Clicking the Profile link will then display other options, such as a list of your courses, any forum and blog entries, and a link to edit your profile.

2 Home

Links to the ICYM website, the students' portal, examination self-print, and the timetable.

3 Dashboard

Every user has their own dashboard which they can customise. The Dashboard is a page for providing users with details of their progress and upcoming deadlines.

You can view your due dates and events on the dashboard.

Dashboard view
4 My Courses

A course is an area where a lecturer adds resources and activities for their students to complete. Course is the representation of your subjects.

You can see your courses at the menu bar. It will list ALL your registered courses for the current semester. Clicking any of the listed courses will bring you to the course page.

My Courses list
5 Course Format

A course format refers to the layout of a course. The course format can be selected in Administration > Course administration > Edit settings.

Course format setting location

It can also be accessed by clicking the gear icon on the right side of your screen, below your username.

Gear icon settings menu

Select course format

Select course format dropdown

Standard course formats

Course Format Description
Weekly format The course is organized week by week, with each section having a date heading. Moodle will create a section for each week of your course. You can add content, forums, quizzes, and so on in the section for each week. The current week is highlighted.
Topics format The course is organised into topic sections that a teacher can give titles to. Each topic section consists of activities, resources, and labels. In new installations of Moodle, this is the default format. With the Weekly, Topics, and any contributed format that implements the functionality, it is possible via Administration > Course administration > Edit settings to "show one section per page."
Collapsed Topics Essentially the same as the standard Topic and Weekly formats but with a "toggle" for each section except "0." The toggles' purpose is to reduce the amount of initial information presented to the user, thus reducing the "scroll of death" that can plague courses with a lot of content. The state of the toggles is remembered on a per course, per user basis.
Onetopic format Shows each topic in a tab, keeping the current tab active between calls to resources, so that when it returns from a module like a blog or glossary it returns to the tab you started from. Based on the standard Moodle "Topics" format.
Tiles format Displays course topics as "Tiles" rather than as a list. When clicked, tile content is displayed under the tile with an animated transition. The layout adapts to different screen sizes and orientations. Within each tile, activities can also be set to display as "sub-tiles." Icons for each tile can be selected from a predefined set.
Topic format (colours) Based on the standard "Topics" format and allows a teacher to specify the foreground and background colours for each course section.
6 Resources

A resource is an item that a teacher can use to support learning, such as a file or link. Moodle supports a range of resource types which teachers can add to their courses. In edit mode, a teacher can add resources via the "Add an activity or resource" link. Resources appear as a single link with an icon in front of it that represents the type of resource.

Administrators can decide whether or not to force teachers to add descriptions for each resource by enabling or disabling a site-wide setting in Administration > Plugins > Activity modules > Common settings.

  • Book — Multi-page resources with a book-like format. Teachers can export their Books as IMS CP (admin must allow the teacher role to export IMS).
  • File — A picture, a pdf document, a spreadsheet, a sound file, a video file.
  • Folder — For helping organize files; one folder may contain other folders.
  • IMS content package — Add static material from other sources in the standard IMS content package format.
  • Page — The student sees a single, scrollable screen that a teacher creates with the robust HTML editor.
  • Text and media area — Can be a few displayed words or an image used to separate resources and activities in a topic section, or can be a lengthy description or instructions.
  • URL — You can send the student to any place they can reach on their web browser, for example Wikipedia.
7 Activities

An activity is a general name for a group of features in a Moodle course. Usually an activity is something that a student will do that interacts with other students and/or the teacher.

In Moodle terminology, an Activity, such as Forums or Quizzes, properly means something students can contribute to directly, and is often contrasted with a Resource such as a File or Page, which is presented by the teacher to them. However, the term "activity" is sometimes used for convenience to refer to both Activities and Resources as a group.

There are 15 different types of activities in standard Moodle, found when editing is turned on and the "Add an activity or resource" link is clicked:

Assignments

Enable teachers to grade and give comments on uploaded files and assignments created on and off line.

BigBlueButton

Run live video conferencing sessions within Moodle.

Chat

Allows participants to have a real-time synchronous discussion.

Choice

A teacher asks a question and specifies a choice of multiple responses.

Database

Enables participants to create, maintain, and search a bank of record entries.

Feedback

For creating and conducting surveys to collect feedback.

Forum

Allows participants to have asynchronous discussions.

Glossary

Enables participants to create and maintain a list of definitions, like a dictionary.

H5P activity

Enables H5P content created in the Content bank, on h5p.com, or with the Lumi App to be easily added to a course as an activity.

Lesson

For delivering content in flexible ways.

(LTI) External tool

Allows participants to interact with LTI-compliant learning resources and activities on other websites. These must first be set up by an administrator on the site before being available in individual courses.

Quiz

Allows the teacher to design and set quiz tests, which may be automatically marked, with feedback and/or correct answers shown.

SCORM

Enables SCORM packages to be included as course content.

Survey

For gathering data from students to help teachers learn about their class and reflect on their own teaching.

Wiki

A collection of web pages that anyone can add to or edit.

Workshop

Enables peer assessment.

8 How to Create an Assignment
  1. On the Moodle course home page, click Turn editing on at the upper right of the page. Turn editing on
  2. In the relevant page section, click Add an activity or resource and, in the resulting pop-up, under ACTIVITIES, select Assignment. Add an activity or resource Select assignment
  3. Enter the following details:
Item Description
Description

Should contain all the instructions for formatting and submitting the assignment, as well as grading criteria. You may want to add a link to a rubric document. Be as detailed about your expectations as possible, especially early in the semester, to minimise questions, issues, and anxiety for your students.

Select the Display description check box if you want the text you entered in the Description to display on the course home page below the assignment's link.

Availability Assignment availability dates

Select Enable and specify the dates and times for Allow submissions from, the Due date, the Cut-off date, and Remind me to grade by.

If you select No at Always show description, the text in the Description field will only display to students on and after the Allow submissions from date.

  • Task dates display on a student's home page when they first log in, and in the Moodle Calendar, which can be subscribed to or imported by other calendar programs.
  • By default, students can submit after the Due date, but not after the Cut-off date. Instructors can grant an extension to allow an individual to submit later.
  • The Cut-off date defaults to the Due date, meaning no late submissions are enabled by default. To allow late submissions, adjust the Cut-off date.
  • Remind me to grade by is the date by which you expect marking to be complete. Enabling this date helps prioritise dashboard notifications, and it displays on your Course overview block and Calendar once at least one student has submitted.
Submission types

Online text — students submit their assignment by placing text in the Moodle text editor. For essays of any length, advise them to complete their work offline and cut-and-paste it into Moodle, rather than risk losing their work if anything happens to their connection mid-submission.

File submissions — allow students to upload an assignment file as their submission (you can create an assignment that allows both online text and file submission).

  • Specify the Maximum number of uploaded files and the Maximum submission size.
  • To restrict which file types can be submitted, specify the file type as an extension in the Accepted File type field — for example, .pdf.
  • To set a word limit on the online text part of the assignment, enable the Word limit field and enter the maximum number of words allowed.
Feedback types

You can allow feedback as comments and files, and create an Offline grading worksheet here instead of in the Gradebook. This ensures marks go into the right activity and can be used by Tutors without giving them access to the whole Gradebook. Comments and grades (but not feedback files) can be downloaded as a spreadsheet.

Selecting Yes for Comment inline copies the original submission into the feedback comment field during grading, so you can add inline comments (e.g. in a different colour) or edit the original text. The student's original submission stays intact.

In the Submission settings section:

  • Selecting Yes for Require students click submit button lets students keep a draft version of their submission, only submitting it when final.
  • At Attempts reopened, use the help icon to decide which option to select.
  • If you select anything other than Never at Attempts reopened, set Maximum attempts to the number of attempts you'll allow.
Group submission

If yes, under settings:

  • At Students submit in groups, select Yes.
  • At Require group to make submission, select Yes if appropriate (Require students click submit must also be Yes for this to be active).
  • At Require all group members submit, select Yes only if you want to prevent users not in a group from submitting.
  • Select the appropriate Grouping for student groups from the drop-down list.
Notifications
  • At Notify graders about submissions, select No unless it's particularly important for teachers to be notified of each submission — select No if you'll be setting up blind marking.
  • If No is selected above, you can also choose whether to Notify graders about late submissions.
  • At Default setting for "Notify students", set the default value for that check box on the grading form (default is No).
  • Select No at Display marker details to students to prevent students from seeing who last modified their grade or feedback.
Grade
  • Select the maximum attainable mark (or appropriate scale) for this assignment from the drop-down list.
  • At Grading method, choose to mark by simply assigning a grade, or by using a marking guide or a rubric.
  • At Grade category, select the Gradebook category where this assignment's marks should be placed (if used).
  • At Grade to pass, enter the minimum grade required to pass — used in activity/course completion and to highlight pass/fail marks in the gradebook.
  • Select whether Blind marking should be used. Once an assignment has been submitted or a mark entered, this setting can no longer be changed.
  • Select No at Use marking workflow if you do not want multiple rounds of marking with manually released marks; otherwise leave Yes selected.
  • Select Yes at Use marking allocation if you want to allocate specific students to a specific marker.

Complete the remainder of the sections as you would for any other Moodle activity, then click Save and return to course.

9 How to Create a Quiz

The quiz activity lets you design and build a set of questions, which can be automatically marked and optionally reveal feedback and/or correct answers to students.

  1. On the Moodle course home page, click Turn editing on at the upper right of the page.
  2. In the relevant section, click Add an activity or resource and, in the pop-up window, select Quiz under ACTIVITIES.
  3. Enter the following details to build the quiz shell:
Item Description
General Give the quiz a clear Name (e.g. "Unit 1 Quiz") and, optionally, a Description of what it covers. Name is the only field required to save a quiz shell — everything else can be adjusted later.
Timing
  • Set Open the quiz and Close the quiz dates to control the window in which students can attempt it.
  • Enable a Time limit if the quiz should be timed.
  • At When time expires, choose whether open attempts are submitted automatically, given a grace period, or must be submitted before time runs out.
Grade
  • Set the Grade category so the quiz's marks feed into the right place in your gradebook.
  • Set Grade to pass if you want a passing threshold (used for activity/course completion).
  • At Attempts allowed, choose how many times a student can attempt the quiz, and at Grading method, choose whether the highest, average, first, or last attempt counts.
Layout Choose how many questions appear per page, and whether the question order should be shuffled for each attempt.
Question behaviour Choose whether answers are shuffled within each question, and select a behaviour such as Deferred feedback (students see results only after submitting the whole quiz) or Immediate feedback (students see results after each question).
Review options Control what students can see and when — for example, whether they see their score, correct answers, or general feedback immediately after their attempt, later while the quiz is still open, or only after it closes.
Extra restrictions on attempts Optionally set a Require password field so students need a code to start the quiz, restrict access by network address, or set a minimum time delay between attempts.

Click Save and return to course to create the quiz shell (or Save and display to move straight into adding questions).

Adding questions to the quiz

  1. Open the quiz and click Edit quiz.
  2. Click Add, then choose a new question (to create one from scratch), from question bank (to reuse an existing question), or a random question (to pull one at random from a category each time the quiz is attempted).
  3. If adding a new question, choose a question type — Moodle offers 15 types, including Multiple choice, True/False, Short answer, Matching, and Drag and drop — then click Add.
  4. Fill in the question's Name, Question text, the possible Answers, the correct answer(s), and any Feedback to show students, then click Save changes.
  5. Repeat the process to add as many questions as the quiz needs. You can reorder questions at any time from the quiz editing screen by dragging them into place.

Once all questions are added, preview the quiz yourself before publishing it to students, to confirm the timing, question order, and grading behave as expected.

10 How to Create Quiz Questions Using ChatGPT and Import Them into Your Course

Rather than typing each quiz question into Moodle by hand, you can ask ChatGPT to draft a batch of questions in a structured file format that Moodle can import directly into the Question bank. This section uses Moodle's XML format, which supports more question types and richer formatting (like HTML and images) than simpler text formats.

Step 1 — Ask ChatGPT to generate questions in Moodle XML format

Give ChatGPT the topic, the number of questions, the question type(s) you want, and ask it to output valid Moodle XML. For example, you could prompt it with something like:

"Create 10 multiple choice questions about [your topic], each with 4 answer options and one correct answer. Format the entire output as a single valid Moodle XML question file, wrapped in a <quiz> tag, so I can import it directly into Moodle's question bank."

A single Moodle XML question looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <quiz> <question type="multichoice"> <name><text>Capital of France</text></name> <questiontext format="html"> <text><![CDATA[<p>What is the capital of France?</p>]]></text> </questiontext> <defaultgrade>1</defaultgrade> <single>true</single> <shuffleanswers>true</shuffleanswers> <answer fraction="100"><text>Paris</text></answer> <answer fraction="0"><text>London</text></answer> <answer fraction="0"><text>Berlin</text></answer> <answer fraction="0"><text>Madrid</text></answer> </question> </quiz>

The fraction="100" marks the correct answer and fraction="0" marks the incorrect ones. All the questions ChatGPT generates should sit inside one shared <quiz>...</quiz> wrapper, one after another.

Step 2 — Review the questions before importing

Always read through the AI-generated questions and answers carefully before importing them. Check that facts are accurate, that only one answer is marked correct where intended (via the fraction values), and that the wording is clear for your students.

Step 3 — Save the questions as an XML file

Copy the generated XML and paste it into a plain text editor (such as Notepad or TextEdit), then save the file with an .xml extension — for example, quiz_questions.xml. Make sure the file starts with the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> line and that every tag is properly closed.

Step 4 — Import the file into Moodle

  1. Go to your course and open the Question bank (found under the course's More menu, or via the quiz's Edit quiz → Question bank screen).
  2. Click Import.
  3. Under File format, select Moodle XML format.
  4. Choose the Category you want the questions saved into (or create a new category to keep them organised, e.g. by topic or week).
  5. Drag your saved .xml file into the Import file box, or click to browse and select it.
  6. Click Import at the bottom of the page. Moodle will show a preview of each question it read from the file — check this preview for errors, then click Continue to finish. If Moodle reports a parsing error, check the XML for an unclosed tag or invalid character and try again.

Step 5 — Add the imported questions to your quiz

Open the quiz you want to add them to, click Edit quiz, then click Add → from question bank. Select the category you imported into, tick the questions you want to include, and click Add selected questions to the quiz.

11 How to View My Grade

All the grades for each student in a course can be found in the course gradebook, or "Grader report," under Settings > Course administration > Grades.

12 Course Completion

Course completion shows if a course has been completed. It can show the progress a student is making toward finishing the course according to specific criteria. The criteria can include meeting an activity's grade level, or a manual "complete" check by either the student and/or teacher. The report can also show if the student has completed another course that is marked as a "completion dependent" course.

Enabling course completion

By default, course completion tracking is enabled. A teacher can change activity completion (completion tracking) for their course from Course administration > Settings, and then change course completion from Course completion.

Course administration menu Completion tracking setting

The table below explains the settings in the Course completion tab (see the Default activity completion and Bulk edit activity completion tabs for related settings).

Setting What it does
General Choose here how you wish to mark the course complete — whether you want Any or All of the requirements that follow to count toward completion.
Condition: Activity completion Tick the boxes of the activities you wish to count toward completion of the course. You need Activity completion enabled to do this, and can decide whether ALL of the activities must be completed or ANY one of them. After completing the selection, review all the activities and save. Activity completion can also be reviewed and changed in the Bulk edit activity completion tab, where you can select multiple activities, edit the completion criterion, and apply it to all of them at once.
Condition: Completion of other courses Makes "completion of another course" a condition for completing the course you're currently working in. This doesn't block the student from the current course — it just means the current course won't be marked complete until the first one has been. Select one or more courses in the "Courses available" box. To remove a course from the list, press Ctrl+click on the highlighted course to deselect it.
Condition: Date If you tick Enable, you can set a date after which the course will be declared complete.
Condition: Enrolment duration If you tick Enable, you can choose a number of days after enrolment upon which the course will be marked complete.
Condition: Unenrolment If you tick Enable, the course will be marked complete once the student is unenrolled.
Condition: Course grade If you tick Enable, you can set a passing grade for the course. Note that course grade in Completion status looks at the total of points (raw grade) rather than a percentage.
Condition: Manual self-completion If enabled, a student can mark the course complete themselves from the Self completion block.
Condition: Manual completion by others Users with selected roles may mark the course as complete if their role is ticked here — roles for which the "Mark users as complete in course completion" capability is allowed. ALL means each role must mark the course complete; ANY means it's classed as complete once one role has marked it.
13 How to Backup & Restore Course

Adapted for quick reference · Student & Course Handbook

Last modified: Thursday, 30 July 2026, 11:49 AM