The new Moodle course template for modules will be the default look, feel and layout for all academic Moodle courses from academic year 26/27. The template has been designed with students in mind to enhance consistency, organisation, and access to key information in Moodle, and should reduce the administrative burden on staff who no longer need to link to centrally held university information e.g. guidance on the use of artificial intelligence that will now be added automatically.

By using the Moodle template, you automatically achieve some key requirements from the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) Baseline.

Key Template Components

Module Information Section

All courses will have a section for module information, which will automatically add key module details, such as start and end dates, credit weightings, learning outcomes, and the teaching team's contact details to the course.

Assessment Details Section

This default section provides a summary of all Moodle-based assessments in the course, allowing students to track their progress through the assessment process. It enables them to easily view what they’ve submitted, what’s outstanding, and when feedback has been received. All LUSI-linked assignments will be created in here by default.

Quick Links

Key sections – module information, assessment details and library resources - now provide links to centrally held university information in context, e.g. for assessment details, students get quick links to academic integrity, AI and extension request guidance. This information will be common across all modules to make it easy to find.

Section Cards

Each section has a summary card which contains the section name, a description and an image. This provides a clear visual organisation to the course and prevents excessive scrolling in larger courses. This can be thought of as a content page for the course.

Progress Tracking

Activity completion will now be enabled by default, with sensible automatic completion conditions added to commonly used Moodle activities. In addition, Moodle will now clearly highlight when new course materials have been added since the student last visited the course, allowing them to monitor their progress and identify when new resources are available to them.

Developing the Template

We have adopted a user-centred design approach for the new Moodle template, involving staff and students in the design process throughout. This has involved running several surveys, conducting numerous workshops, in-depth interviews, and testing iterations of designs to gain a deeper understanding of how people are using Moodle. By identifying common problems and pain points, we suggested possible fixes and tested these with people to validate that they improved the user experience for everyone. The template provides improved support for neurodiverse learners.

In the Academic year 25/26, we've completed two pilots using the new template to further validate the new design and implemented further improvements based on the feedback from these pilots. These pilots included approximately 70 modules across all faculties and disciplines.

Adopting the Template

In summer 2026, course rollover will be paused in line with Curriculum Transformation requirements, and we’ll all get new Moodle courses, linked to our new modules, with the new template applied automatically. These courses will be empty and will need to be populated with learning materials manually. We recommend taking this opportunity to review the structure and layout of your Moodle course, as the template alone isn’t enough to address all the problems highlighted by students. Support will be offered to achieve this, and everyone will need to achieve the VLE Baseline, but should go further and incorporate the Designing a good Moodle course guidance where possible.