Moodle tips and tutorials

For a quick introduction to working with Moodle and the possibilities of digital teaching, we have created a Moodle self-study course for you. In handy lessons you can learn everything about creating your own course and how to use it. If you are already using Moodle and have questions about a particular activity or need specific guidance, you can refer to our Moodle Glossary.

Frequently asked questions about online teaching with Moodle

What are the basic steps to conduct online teaching using the Moodle learning platform?

We recommend - if not already done - to create a course room on the learning platform Moodle for each course if possible. Information on course creation can be found here.

In the course rooms, you can upload learning materials and course documents (except video files and other large files) and thus make them available to your students. You can upload video files to the BTU media portal and then embed them in Moodle.

More information can be found at:

  • How can I upload a video/audio file to the BTU media portal and then make it available in the Moodle course?

Course rooms in Moodle can be administered by instructors themselves. If you have not used Moodle before, we recommend the Moodle self-study course, which shows you everything you need to know to provide online teaching to your students. If you need BTU-specific tutorials or have a question about any of the Moodle activities, you can find relevant information in the Moodle Help course.

We are happy to assist you with questions and the implementation of various learning activities (e.g. forum, assignments, chat rooms, etc.) that you can use for your teaching.

In the following sections you will find more information about how you can design your teaching with asynchronous (preferred) and synchronous scenarios on this basis.

Can the Moodle learning platform be used as usual or do we have to expect overload?

Currently, we do not see any capacity issues with the regular use of courses in Moodle.

There are limitations in the use of the Adobe Connect functionality integrated in Moodle. DFN asks that you no longer create Adobe Connect meeting rooms in Moodle, as this leads to additional overload on the service.

Furthermore, we would like to ask you to use storage capacities sparingly. In particular, videos should not be stored directly on Moodle, but on the BTU media portal and linked in Moodle courses.

Other large files can be stored in OwnCloud and shared if necessary or also stored and linked on the document server.

How do students get access to their Moodle courses?

All students with BTU accounts have access to the Moodle learning platform, but they must enroll in courses.

To enable students to access their Moodle courses as easily as possible, we recommend choosing the "self-enrollment" enrollment method. As there are currently only exceptional cases of face-to-face courses, students should not be given an enrollment key (password for enrollment) for self-enrollment. This key was usually given to the students during the first face-to-face event and served to increase the protection of the course content against unauthorized access.

However, it is recommended to assign a time window for self-enrollment (start of enrollment, end of enrollment). Due to the lack of an enrollment key, we ask all course administrators to independently check (if possible) whether the enrolled participants are actually authorized to view the course content. If this is not the case, the participants in question must be manually removed from the course.

Information and instructions on enrollment, enrollment methods and the enrollment key can be found here in the Moodle Help course.