A common issue with Moodle is the inability to see your courses for the coming semester. The causes of this problem are straightforward, and easily remedied.
- Courses have not yet been released: It's possible that access to the courses you need is not yet open.
- For faculty: T&I generally opens access to Fall courses around mid-April, and to Spring courses around mid-November. If you aren't sure, you can always check with T&I, but if we're well inside those windows, read on for other solutions.
- For students: Courses are generally marked hidden from students unless and until the professor teaching the course explicitly marks it visible. If the course has accidentally been left marked as hidden, it will be readily apparent, because nobody in the class will be able to see it. If you're confident the class should be visible, read on for further solutions.
- You have taught or taken more than 12 courses: By default, the Moodle dashboard's Course overview filter is set to All (except removed from view).
For users without a large backlog of past courses, this is fine. However, this page is limited to showing 12 total courses, so once your total course count exceeds a dozen you may have to scour multiple pages to find particular course, using the right and left arrows at the bottom of the page.
If your dashboard isn't currently showing the course(s) you need, scroll to the bottom of the list and check to make sure that there isn't more than one page of course cards. - Your filter is set to exclude courses that haven't started yet: This is by far the most common cause. One frequently-employed tactic for reducing the list of classes displayed on the dashboard is to select In progress as the filter. This is a bit of a trap, particularly in the summer — recall that courses have defined start and end dates in their settings.
By selecting In progress any time before next semester's courses have started (and/or, especially in the summer, after last semester's courses have ended) you may effectively filter out not only your coming courses, but all your past ones as well.
To avoid this trap, filter for courses that haven't started yet by selecting Future. (Just remember to set this filter to In progress once the course start date passes.)
- Faculty only – your course start date is set incorrectly: If an error has occurred in setting the start date for the course (which is rare, but does happen), students looking at their dashboard in any view other than Future may be unable to see or access the course page. To correct the start date setting, open the Moodle course page, click the gray cogwheel, select Edit settings, and change the Start date to the correct date.
If you have verified that courses have been released, checked for multiple pages of course listings, made sure your filters are set correctly, and are sure the course start date is set correctly, and you still don't see your courses, there's one more step to try: Search. From the left-side navigation menu (click the hamburger icon at the top left if you don't see the menu), click Site home.
In the Search courses field, enter any combination of the department abbreviation, course number and section, semester/year, and course title — for example, "mat 150a fall 2021" — to search for courses. Depending on the specificity of your search string, you may get more than one result. Click the link to open your course, and afterward it should appear in the Recently accessed courses section of your Dashboard.
If you still don't see your course, or if you get a link to the course with no teacher assigned, it's possible there has been an error in assigning the course. In this case, please email ti@davidson.edu for assistance.