Courses is a platform we run ourselves, which means we can respond to what you tell us quickly. Several of the improvements below came from early feedback and went live within days, without waiting on a vendor's release schedule. If something would make teaching or running your course easier, tell us at courses@extension.org.
New tools in your instructor admin
- Edit your own course description. In My Courses, choose Edit description. You can format text and add links and images, and the change is live right away. The title, price, category and other settings stay with the Foundation.
- Show, hide or close your course. Hide a course from the Store to stop new enrollments while current students keep going. To retire a course entirely, such as last year's edition, choose Close course. It disappears from the Store and enrolled students can no longer enter that course, but nobody is unenrolled and their records are kept. Reopen it any time. Closing affects only that course, never a student's other courses or their account.
- Copy your course link. Once a course is published, its link and a Copy link button appear in My Courses.
- Student surveys. Email students who enrolled in a course during a period you choose, either all of them or a random sample of a size you pick, and invite them to take your survey. You see how many students will receive it, never their email addresses, and replies come to you. Each email includes an unsubscribe link, and no student is emailed more than once every 60 days.
- Pay the platform fee for your students. Buy $10 access codes for your students to redeem. If you can't predict how many you'll need, ask us about a class code: one shared code for your course, with students counted as they join and billed afterward.
- Quarterly payout statements. After each calendar quarter ends, we prepare each financial manager's statement of course sales, Stripe fees and refunds. An administrator reviews it before it goes to Accounts Payable. Financial managers can see their statements and keep their payment details up to date online.
Sign in to your instructor admin at courses.extension.org/admin.
What's new in Moodle, where your students take the course
- A new look. The site has a redesigned theme with a wider page, a card layout for course lists and image-forward course cards. Nothing about how you build or teach a course has changed.
- Signing in goes through courses.extension.org. Anyone who isn't signed in is sent to the Courses login. After a timeout, learners sign in again and land on the page they were on, not the dashboard.
- Course availability is managed on courses.extension.org. Whether a course is available is controlled from your instructor admin, not inside Moodle, so hiding it in Moodle could lock out learners who are already enrolled. That's why every course shows as visible in Moodle. Learners can't see a course unless they're enrolled in it.
Behind the scenes
- Moodle has been updated to a current release, with the latest fixes and security patches.
- We increased the server's capacity and tuned it for Campus-level busy periods.
- Files up to 4 GB can be uploaded, with timeouts long enough for big videos.
- We installed the plugins your Campus courses used, including course formats, certificate options, interactive video (H5P), questionnaires, checklists, and the reporting and progress blocks. Courses restored from Campus backups should work as they did before.