Show & Hide: Making a Moodle Course Visible

Summary

Update the visibility of a Moodle page to show the course page and give students access.

Body

What do I do if students can’t see or access my course?

All St Olaf courses are created with the Kickstart format with visibility set to Show. Instructors see the template chooser and course importer tools, and students see a message that nothign has been uploaded to the site yet. Once you choose a template, this is applied and the course is set to be hidden. This prevents students from seeing course materials before you’re ready for them to be seen. If you imported a previous course, visibility will be whatever it was for that previous course - likely Show. However, if you subsequently hid the course to work on it, or you chose a template, you'll need to set the Course Visibility to Show for students to have access to your course.

The Start and End Date of the course will also impact how others are able to view the content. Depending on the dates used, this will change where the course appears on the Moodle Dashboard when first arriving at the website, such as previous or future courses not appearing when In progress courses are chosen for display.

Updating Course Visibility

 On the Moodle course page, click on Settings under the course title.

Screen capture of Moodle course page showing course title and secondary menu with Settings highlighted with an arrow

In the General settings, update the Course visibility dropdown to say Show instead of Hide.

Screen capture of Moodle course settings page with Course visibility field highlighted with an arrow

Click Save and display.

Course Start and End Date

The State and End Date of the course will change when the course appears on the Moodle Dashboard page.

By default, Moodle is set to show all of the courses that are currently In Progress. In order to see Future or Past courses, click on the dropdown below the Course overview title, and choose either of those options, or All to see all courses that you have not personally hidden, or Removed from view to see courses that you have chosen to hide from your normal Dashboard view.

Screen capture of Moodle Dashboard page showing Course overview section and dropdown list expanded with options All, In progress, Future, Past, Starred, and Removed from view

If the link to the course does not appear on the Dashboard in the intended category, check the dates in the settings. On the Moodle course page, click Settings from the secondary menu under the course title..

Screen capture of Moodle course page showing course title and secondary menu with Settings highlighted with an arrow

In the General settings, confirm that the Course Visibility is set to Show. 

Screen capture of Moodle course settings page showing options for setting course start and course end dates

To move the course to the In Progress section:

  • Course state date - needs to be set for today or a date that has already passed.

  • Course end date - the course end date should either not be set or set for a future date.

Update the course dates to match these rules.

Still Unable to Access the Course Page?

If student(s) are still unable to access the page after checking the visibility and date, contact the Moodle team and we can verify their account status with Moodle.

Please note - if someone is trying to access the Moodle course but has not registered for the course, we may have to verify their status with the Registrar first before they are added to the course.

Details

Details

Article ID: 105448
Created
Wed 4/15/20 4:12 PM
Modified
Thu 9/7/23 5:09 PM