Moodle: Icons

Now that you are Moodling, you have surely noticed the little images (icons) strewn about the site and your courses. What do they all mean? Knowing this will help you create and edit courses more easily and quickly. 

1. Some icons are visible before you even log in to Moodle. On the front page of your installation, you may see an icon that looks like a little solar system. This is the symbol for a course category.

The face in profile means that guests may enter a course.

The key means that users will have to know an enrollment key to enter a course.

And you have probably already figured out that the "i" icon means more information about a course is available.

Please note that I am assuming for now that your site uses a standard theme with the most common icon set.

 2. Let's go beyond the front page of your site. Log in, enter a course and enable editing so that we may do so.

 3. One of the most common icons you will encounter is a little hand clutching a pen.

Click on this icon to in order to add text and images to the front page of a course or to edit an existing activity or resource like a web page or a forum.

 4. Beside the link to an activity or a resource, you see an eye icon.

If the eye is open, the activity or resource is visible to students. If the eye is closed, the activity or resource is hidden from students.

Click on this icon to change it from open to closed or vice versa.

 5. Also visible are arrows that point to the left and to the right.

Click on these arrows to indent or outdent the links to activities and resources. Doing so can help make your course a bit more user-friendly - always a good thing

 6. You also see arrows that point up and down. Click on this icon to move an activity or resource vertically.

 7. Wherever the delete icon is visible, you can click on it to remove an activity or resource from your site. This cannot be undone, so Moodle will give you a chance to change your mind when you click on this icon.

8. There may be times when you need context-sensitive help for an activity or resource. Clicking on the question-mark icon will cause a pop-up window containing necessary information to launch.

 9. There are icons associated with each of Moodle's activities and resources. As you spend more time with Moodle, you will become familiar with the ones you use most often.

 10. Depending upon the configuration of your site, you may see the icon highlighted in the screen capture to the right. If this icon is, indeed, visible to you, you may click on it to assign roles associated with a specific activity, resource or block in your course. This is a way of controlling access to that course component.

 11. Sometimes, a course has many sections. This can mean that users have to scroll up and down a lot to navigate your course. It is possible to avoid this, though. To collapse a course so that only one section is visible, click on the single square icon in any section. Doing so will cause only that section to be visible. Other sections will then be accessible via a drop-down menu beneath that section.

 12. If you wish to expand the sections of your course so that all are visible, click on the double-square icon. All sections will reappear and your drop-down menu will disappear.

 13. Do you see the little light bulb in each section of your course? Click on one to highlight a specific section of your course for your students. Click on another one, and it will become the highlighted section of your course.

 14. You remember the arrows for moving an activity or resource up or down. There are also vertical arrows that enable you to move entire sections of your course. This can save you a great deal of time  when you decide to reorganize course content.

 15. You may have noticed plus and minus signs associated with each block of your course. Clicking on these will hide and unhide the contents of the blocks.

 16. There are other icons associated with course blocks. They are already familiar to you, aren’t they?

 17. There are various icons in the course administration menu. They are conveniently labeled for you, so I am sure you won't forget what they mean.

 18. I mentioned that I am assuming that you are using a standard theme with the most common icons. This is, of course, not always true. The icon sets used in other themes differ a bit from the ones we have seen here.

This theme (below) is called Imagine 2, by the way. The icons are a bit different, but still not too mysterious.

To discuss this and other aspects of Moodling, visit the Moodle Mentor Forums at The Faculty Room, a free community of dedicated Moodlers.

-- Art Lader September 2007 --