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Customising Moodle with Course Formats Alex Walker Presented at Moodlemoot Edinburgh 2014 www.moodlemoot.ie
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Custom Course Formats
Alex Walker City of Glasgow College
The Point Of This Talk
• An introduction to course formats.
• An overview of the course formats available to you.
• A brief tutorial on building your own.
Why Build a Course Format
• Control how items are displayed.
• Add extra things to the course page.
• Customise your Moodle courses to reflect the way your institution teaches.
Why Build a Course Format
Why Build a Course Format
Pros & Cons
• Create 'useful links' that make it easier for teachers to run courses.
• Add features without using blocks.
• New ways of organising and displaying course materials.
Masonry Format
Grid Format
One Topic Format
Other Course Formats
• Some course formats don't have sections at all.
• Moodle's social course format is just a forum.
• Singleactivity makes a course that is just a single activity (2.6+)
Building a Course Format
• You don't have to start from scratch!
• Take a copy of the 'topics' folder and rename a few things.
• Moodle's developer wiki has documentation on course formats.
• Warning! Upgrading from Moodle 2.3 or lower will break your course formats.
Building a Course Format
• Rename the folder, language file, and class name in lib.php
• Search and replace in the format's files: from format_topics to format_whatever.
• Your topic is ready to customise.
Building a Course Format
• format.php is responsible for outputting the course's main content area.
• The heavy lifting is devolved to renderer.php
Building a Course Format
• format.js holds any Javascript you need.
• styles.css contains any CSS you need for your format - don't put it in your theme's CSS.
Building a Course Format
• If you want to customise the overall page layout, you can change format.php
• If you want to customise how sections are output, you can use renderer.php
• You can always look through other formats to find examples.
Building a Course Format
Building a Course Format
Building a Course Format
Building a Course Format
Building a Course Format
Building a Course Format
Building a Course Format
Building a Course Format
Building a Course Format
• Course formats can have 'fields' that let you customise information.
• For example, this optional Twitter Username field pulls in tweets from that user.
• Can be set up in your format's lib.php file.
Building a Course Format
Questions
Alex Walker City of Glasgow College