Download your Moodle course content

November 16, 2020 By Moodle

Contributed by — Dr. Laurie Korte, MUA Committee Member

 

Over 245 million people use Moodle all over the world. With such a big user base, for us at Moodle HQ, it’s fundamental we listen to educators, teachers, instructional designers and administrators using Moodle. This enables us to keep making the Moodle LMS better and better, to support organizations worldwide reach their learning goals.

Whether it is through our public development management tool Moodle Tracker or during our roadmap sessions at one of our Moodle events, we have a bunch of different ways our users can let our team know what they need Moodle to help them achieve. One of the most influential channels is the Moodle Users Association (MUA), an independent not-for-profit organization that unites the voices of Moodle users to request and fund new features for our open-source LMS through a voting system.

For the latest Moodle 3.10 release, and with 64,815 votes from members, the feature proposed and funded by the MUA was the new Download Course feature to be incorporated into Moodle 3.10.

Let’s have a look at this new feature, especially relevant for students:


Improving Moodle as we enter a new way of learning

At a time when many educational institutions around the world are still teaching fully online during the Covid-19 pandemic, there are more resources and materials hosted on Moodle sites than ever. 

With so much educational content in online courses, many of our organizational members started to receive requests from students. They wanted to be able to download course materials so they could keep them for reference and relook at these resources even after their courses were closed” Dr. Laurie Korte, MUA Committee member + Solution Architect at Remote Learner

Downloading content from their online courses also enables learners to browse this content offline, without having to be permanently connected to the internet. Teachers, of course, can also download their own course materials to access outside of Moodle. 

Start using it right away! 

The new Download Course feature can be enabled by the Administrator of Moodle sites (running on Moodle 3.10) from the Site administration panel. The Administrator can also set the limits on the size of files downloaded, to keep control of the load of the Moodle site.

To download the available course content, the Learner just has to click on the new ‘Download course content’ button that will appear on their course homepages: this will download all content contained in the course’s File, Folder, Page and Label resources, compressed in a zip folder.

If you want to see the new Course Download, watch the presentation that Moodle HQ’s Mary Cooch and Helen Foster did in the latest Moodle Users Association town hall meeting. Town hall meetings are held once a month and generally have a team member from Moodle HQ as a guest, to talk about all the latest news and upcoming projects for the Moodle LMS.

 


We hope to extend this feature to add more activities to the download in future releases, stay tuned!

Shape the future of Moodle

The Moodle Users Association connects Moodle users and helps unite their voices to foster and fund new features and enhancements to our open source LMS Moodle.  Become a MUA member today and help us shape the future of Moodle.