Blocks

Blocks are page elements that contain various information and can be added in the right-hand column or in the middle of the page.
To show the block bar on the right-hand side, click on „Open block drawer“ at the top right.

Blocks can be added to any Moodle page via „Add a block“ in edit mode. To do this, switch the Moodle page to edit mode. Click on „Add a block“ in the top right-hand corner of the page.

Note: The Moodle design of the Jade University only supports blocks on the right-hand side (in your courses) or in the content area (on the Dashboard).

are interactive course elements that can be added to any course section via a drop-down menu when the course page is switched to edit mode. The Activities block lists all the activities available in the course (e.g. forums, tests, etc.) as well as the work materials (which are not actually interactive elements). This enables convenient, targeted navigation to these course elements. When you start creating a course, you will usually only see the „Forum“ activity as there is an announcements forum in the course by default. The more content you make available in the course, the larger the list will be.

displays a list of future events. The events can be:

• Appointments that have been entered in the calendar,
• Deadlines for tasks, if these have been entered,
• Availability dates (e.g. when the availability of a lesson ends).

This block shows dates from these four possible categories:

• General dates (valid page-wide and visible in all course calendars - are entered by the administrator (Moodle team))
• Course dates (only visible for the members of the respective course - entered by the teacher)
• Group dates (only visible to members of the respective group - entered by the teacher)
• Personal appointments (only visible to the individual participant who also enters these appointments)

lists what has happened in the course since the last login: new or changed activities, new forum posts, submitted tasks, etc. An overview page with filter functions can be accessed via the „All recent activities“ link at the top of the block. This can be used to display activities by user, activity or date.

An RSS is a type of subscription for content on websites that is regularly updated. An RSS block can be added in Moodle. You can add your own feeds via the cogwheel → „Configure block“. The feeds for the „Infosys“ of the Jade University are preset and can be selected. There is the whole „Infosys“ as a feed or the individual departments separately.

You can use a text block to place text and images in a block. The entry of a title is optional and can be left blank. This flexible block can fulfill a wide variety of functions and objectives. Thanks to the HTML editor that is also available here, text can be formatted and images and links can be placed. Any valid HTML code can also be used by switching to source code view. For example, you could enter office hours or contact options here so that students are informed about your availability.

With Opencast, teachers (role „Teacher“) can make finished videos available in the Moodle course room or easily produce new videos with Opencast Studio and make them available in the course room.

The „Tags“ block lists, for example, the course-related tags (keywords) in a kind of word cloud (Tag Cloud). To do this, add the block in the course room and select the course itself as the context.

• Option „Tags in context“: [select course name here]

A complete list of all blocks and functions can be found here:

• Blocks on Moodle.org
• Blocks on YouTube

You can configure specific settings for some blocks. For a text block, for example, you can enter the title of the block, which then appears in the header.

You have various options for the placement of blocks:

• Original block location: Gives information about where the block was originally created.
• Display on page types: Here you can define the context in which the block is displayed.
• Default region: The selection „Right“ cannot be changed.
• Default weight: This determines where a block appears within the selected column: -10 means at the top, 10 means at the bottom of the column.

• Visible: „Yes“ or „No“
• Region: The selection „Right“ cannot be changed.
• Weight: Here you can override the default weighting for the block for this Moodle page.