It is good practice to structure your course from the start. This is partly because moving things around might be more time consuming later.

Structuring a course can mean creating a storyboard and collating a set of materials before deciding how best to display and deliver them. It will also help you decide which Moodle resources and activities are the most suitable to use in each part of your course.

We recommend that your course has the following as a minimum:

• Course overview: A section at the start of the course that has useful information about it. Other names for this section could be ‘Introduction’ or ‘Before you start’.
• Learning outcomes: A list that explains to your potential learners what they can expect to learn by studying the course. Guidance on writing learning outcomes is available in another free resource on OpenLearn Create.
• Structured sections: Your course needs to have a straightforward logical structure that reflects the amount of material included and the time that your learners might need to work through it. This includes deciding how it is displayed onscreen: it’s easier to go through several hours of study by dividing the material into sections that start on a different page, whereas for a very short course, all the material could probably be on one page. Think about each of your learning outcomes, and how and when you’d like to address them – it can sometimes be useful to dedicate one section to each one. The content for each section should then be broken up into smaller sub-sections, suitable for reading on a screen – ideally with a catchy and engaging title. (Where we refer to sections here, you may prefer to divide your learning into weeks, units or topics, or something else.)
• Overview text: It’s helpful for your learners if you briefly introduce each section (or week or topic) to explains what they should expect to cover in it.
• Assessment and rewards: If your learners pass a quiz they can earn a badge or a statement of participation.
• Acknowledgements: An essential page if some of the resources you include are not your copyright; it is also important as a place to properly acknowledge who was involved in writing your course. An acknowledgments page should include information about authors, other contributors and a list of all the resources used for which you do not own the copyright, and have cleared the copyright to use. You need to include full attribution information for each resource used – title, author, source and licence – even if you have given attribution information with the resources elsewhere in the course, for example in a caption for an image). Good examples of acknowledgements pages can be found elsewhere in this guidance. 
• A list of references: For resources you have cited. References will show your course is based on credible, valid data as well as knowledge and experience of those involved in writing the course.