Free guide

Before you attempt to upload anything online, you will need to think about the following:

1. Audience and purpose
2. Learning Design
3. Structure and Metadata
4. Writing the course
5. Copyright
6. Accessibility
7. Assessment and rewards

If you do not require support or extended functionality you can create your own space in OpenLearn Create for your open course or resource by following these instructions.

1. Sign in (you may need to register an account first)
2. Create a course and the Course metadata form
3. Your course space - edit settings metadata about your space

You will need to add the following to your course home page:

1. Course and banner images and theme colour (see also Collection banner image if you need a Collection for your courses)
2. Add a course description
   Optional: Adding Video or images to the course description
   
3. Add Learning Outcomes

You  need to choose and set up the structure of your course. Moodle offers various course format options which determine the layout of the course page.

1. Course format options
2. The Topics format
3. The Freeform format

You have created a course space and want others to help you author and edit the course.  You can invite colleagues to collaborate in the draft course space. 

1. How to invite others to collaborate
2. General Data Protection Rules

There are various resource and activity types which can be added to a course/material/competition. Some of these are only available to you if you have the course manager or teacher role. Some resources and activities are pedagogically suitable for using in any course, while some can only be used in teacher/tutor supported courses. See the table on Pedagogical uses.

Resource types enable almost any kind of web content to be inserted into the course.

• Book is a multi-page resource in a book-like format, with chapters and subchapters, useful for displaying lengthy information. 
• File provide a downloadable Word document, a PDF, an Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint slides as a course resource.
• Heading enables text and optional icons to be inserted among activities on the course page.
• Label enables text and multimedia to be inserted into the course page between links to other resources and activities.
• Page can display text, images, sound, video, web links and embedded code, such as Google maps. 
• Subpage no longer available to add. Existing subpages are still visible in courses on the site.
  
• URL The URL module enables a teacher to provide a web link as a course resource.

Activities, such as forums, quizzes and wikis enable interactive content to be added to the course. Some are only suitable for a tutor/teacher supported course (tutor only) rather than a free standing open educational resource.

• Assignment allows learners to submit assignments for grading (tutor only)
• Blog allows for creation of blogs within a course (tutor only)
• Choice enables a tutor to ask a question and offer possible responses (tutor only)
• Custom Certificate is your preferred design, rather than standard Statement of Participation
• Forum provides a discussion Moodle forum facility (tutor only)
• Glossary can be a list of definitions, like a dictionary, or resources for information.  
• H5P HTML5 Package of interactive content (presentations, videos, multimedia, questions etc).
  
• Lesson enables sharing content and/or practice activities in flexible ways (tutor only). 
• Questionnaire allows survey construction using a variety of survey question types.
• Quiz enables a course author to create quizzes comprising questions of various types.
• SCORM package Shareable Content Object Reference Model collection of files.   
• StudentQuiz allows students to add questions for the crowd (tutor only).
• Wiki lets users edit a set of linked pages, often a collaborative activity (tutor only). 
• Workshop enables collection, review and peer assessment of students' work (tutor only)
  

You can move content within a course:

1. Re-organising order of topics or pages
2. Navigation between sections

You need the course manager role for your course to configure enrolment keys.

1. Using open and closed cohorts
2. Setting up an enrolment key
3. Groups and enrolment keys
4. Using group enrolment keys for enrolment
5. Restricting course activities to cohort groups
6. Manually adding a user to a group
7. Notifying learners about enrolling on your course

If you need to set up completion tracking of activities so that a Statement of Participation or Badge can be configured for your course, you need to switch on the Course completion tracking in the Edit settings. These checks and setup should only be done after everything else in the course is ready, including the quizzes. Some of this configuration (badges) can only be setup by someone with ‘manager’ permissions for a course. If you are the course ‘owner’ you will need to request the ‘manager’ role for your course from openlearncreate@open.ac.uk (please provide the URL of the course for which you are requesting ‘manager’ permissions).

1. Set up completion tracking
2. Set up activity tracking
3. Quiz activity settings
4. Bulk editing the resource and activity completion settings
5. Course activity completion
6. Test the course materials and the quiz
7. Set up the badge
8. Final checks
9. Enable the badge
10. Set up the Statement of Participation

Before requesting publication, it is sensible to check and test everything is working as you expect.

There is a publication authorisation step now on the platform which means when you decide to publish your course, a message will be sent to the openlearncreate@open.ac.uk mailbox for the platform managers to check the course is actually ready for publication.