Customising Moodle with Course Formats Alex Walker Presented at Moodlemoot Edinburgh 2014 www.moodlemoot.ie

1. Custom Course Formats
Alex Walker
City of Glasgow College

2. 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.

5. 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.

6. Why Build a Course Format

7. Why Build a Course Format

8. 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.

9. Masonry Format

10. Grid Format

11. One Topic Format

12. 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+)

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. Building a Course Format
• format.php is responsible for
outputting the course's main
content area.
• The heavy lifting is devolved to
renderer.php

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. Building a Course Format

19. Building a Course Format

20. Building a Course Format

21. Building a Course Format

22. Building a Course Format

23. Building a Course Format

24. Building a Course Format

25. Building a Course Format

26. 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.

27. Building a Course Format

28. Questions
Alex Walker
City of Glasgow College