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