Click here to view the accompanying video tutorial for this topic. 

One thing that many people don’t know about, or stumble across by accident, is the link called Settings in the Administration Block. This has a great deal of information, and is entirely editable.  However, the short name and the course ID number should not be changed, as it will interfere with the registrar's office's automatic enroll and unenroll process.

You may change the following:

• The summary
• The format- the default format is weekly, though many people like to use topic format. Topic format (pictured below) allows you to choose a number of topics, and each topic is a different section, like a week, but not tied to any particular date. The other formats are less intuitive, and not as useful.
  

• Hidden sections- collapsed form, or completely invisible outside of editing mode
• The number of news items to appear in the Recent News block
• The language for your course page (see the document on the right about Languages in Moodle)
  
• Whether or not Grades are shown- if set to no, you can still use Gradebook, but the students won’t be able to access their grades
• Site Theme- you can change the color and style of your site, but be careful: some themes work better than others. See our gallery of screenshots for the various themes available in Moodle.
  
• MetaCourse- this is used to group together related courses, often for different lab sections; add the other courses with the new link under Assign Roles in the Administration Block
• Whether groups are active or not- usually not used since Carleton classes are so small
• Whether guests can access your course (see How Public are your Moodle Pages? before you change this setting!)