Uploading Course Materials & Publishing a Course

This page contains information for lecturers.

Getting Started

Course materials are hosted within the department's Moodle VLE.

To upload materials, go to the Courses site homepage and click the "log in" link in the top right corner. Enter your Single Sign-On (SSO) account details if/when prompted to do so.

Once logged in, either navigate to your course using the list at the bottom of the homepage, or click "My courses" to see just the courses you have been added to. Make sure you select the course for the correct year - older courses are likely to be listed first in My courses because it defaults to alphabetical order.

On the course page, expand "Course information" to see the synopsis, number of lectures, etc. You cannot edit this section, so please email academic administration if you spot any issues. You can also see if you have already been assigned as the lecturer of the course.

If you have been assigned as the lecturer of the course, you should see the "Edit mode" toggle in the top-right corner - click that to turn edit mode on and start editing the course. If you haven't been assigned yet, please email academic administration.

A course can contain several modules. They are usually split up into "General" - containing Announcements, Lecture Videos, Reading List and Discussion Forum - and "Course Materials" - containing problem sheets, lecture notes, quizzes, and so on. These are likely to have been copied across from the previous year, but you can add/remove/reorder modules as required.

Adding Problem Sheets or Other Assignments

It's best not to create a new blank assignment yourself, because this will not have the correct settings. Instead, choose an existing one, click the "three dots" icon and click "Duplicate". That will ensure that all options are set correctly.

Click the "three dots" icon next to the copy that was created, and select "Edit settings". Here you can change various properties about the assignment, including its name. Note that the name is important, because if you mention that name anywhere in the course, it will automatically be converted to a link to this assignment.

In the "Description" field, please enter information for students about which lectures/videos/sections of lecture notes correspond to this sheet. For example:

This block of work corresponds to Week 3. It is an introduction to concepts such as mathematical induction, partitions and sets. The relevant section of the lecture notes is Chapters 2 and 3.

You can use $\LaTeX$ formulae throughout by enclosing them between \(...\) (inline format) or \[...\] (display format). If you want to embed a Panopto video, you can do so by pressing the green Panopto logo button in the editor.

Under "Additional files", click any files that were duplicated and click "Delete" to remove them. Then click the "Add" icon and upload the problem sheet PDF. Please include the course name in the filename to help students to identify downloaded files later - for example, AnalysisI_Sheet1.pdf is more helpful than Sheet1.pdf . If you have further files to add for students, such as published solutions for certain problems, they can go here too.

Note: We do not currently have a facility to upload the LaTeX source files. Please keep them safe in case you need to make any changes or a student requests them for accessibility reasons.

To upload the solution sheets for TAs and Tutors, scroll down to "Feedback types & solutions" and expand it. Tick "Solution sheet" if it is not already ticked. Remove any duplicated files, then upload the solutions.

Make sure "Show solutions to students" is set to "No" (unless you want to make the solutions available to students).

Note: Making a module "Not visible to students" will actually make it invisible to everyone who is not a Lecturer or TA on your course - meaning College Tutors would not be able to access it either. So it's important that the solution sheet field is used to upload solutions that should be visible to tutors, not a separate module.

Under "Common module settings", you can choose whether to show the assignment immediately or keep it hidden from students until you are ready.

When you are finished, scroll to the end and click "Save and display" to see the result.

To make further changes, click "Settings". To return to the main course page, click the course title in the breadcrumbs, or expand the left menu and click "General".

Adding Other Resources

To upload your lecture notes, slides or other resources, click the "Add an activity or resource" link at the bottom of Course Materials.

Select the appropriate module type. The ones you may want to use are:

• File - Upload a single file which does not require any work submission by the students (i.e. not a problem sheet or other assignment - see above), e.g. lecture notes
• Folder - Upload multiple related files
• Page - Enter content that can be viewed directly in Moodle
• Quiz - Create an online test that is marked automatically
• URL - Link to an external website (please do not use this for your own course materials - upload them to Moodle instead)

In many cases, "File" will be the best choice.

Enter a suitable name. As above, make sure you use a sensible name, as any mention of that name anywhere in the course will be converted to a link to the resource.

Optionally enter a description and tick "Display description on course page".

Upload the file. Make sure the filename includes the course name, so students can find it after downloading it.

Previewing a Course as a Student or Tutor

There is a useful feature in Moodle that allows you to see the page how a college tutor, student or guest (i.e. a person that is not enrolled on the course, including the general public) would see it. You can do this even if the course is not published yet.

Click your initials or avatar in the top right corner and select "Switch role to...", then select one of the available roles.

To return to your normal Lecturer role, use the same menu and select "Return to my normal role". If you want to make further changes to the course, you will need to enable "Edit mode" again.

Publishing a Course

Once you are happy with your course, you can make it visible to students, if academic admin haven't done so already (which usually happens in week -1 or week 0). From the main course page, click the "Settings" tab.

Change "Course visibility" to "Show", then click "Save and display".