Moodle Roadmap Overview

Roadmap is a Moodle activity you can build into your course to provide students with an interactive visualization of course activities and assessments. Students can use the Roadmap to track completed activities and fill their “activity rings” in your course to visually monitor their own progress.

Why Use a Course Roadmap?

Many of our students need help with the cognitive processes that help them make decisions, prioritize tasks, work towards goals, monitor progress, etc. There are things you can do to help them self-reflect and motivate themselves to work towards goals. The Moodle Roadmap is one tool that can help you increase your students’ ability to self-regulate and improve their executive functioning skills. Our brains don’t fully develop until we are in our mid-20s, and some of our students need that extra help.

A tip from UDL on Campus by CAST is to do the following with your Moodle course:

• Design clear, interactive course headings and icons
• Group content into logical learning units and divide information into small segments
• Provide checklists for making progress

The Roadmap can help you and your students with these goals!

• How to Get Started
• Best Practices
• Examples
• Resources

How to Get Started

1. Plan out all course activities, resources, and assessments in advance. A course map can help you with planning the components of your course. Decide which resources and activities will be required.
2. Organize the course content in a Moodle Project space, using a consistent structure for each section. (Using the Quick Start Course Shell can help you organize a course quickly.)
3. Set dates and activity completion conditions for all required resources and activities.
4. Read the Moodle Roadmap Instructor Guide for detailed steps to create a Roadmap activity.

Best Practices

• Read the Moodle Roadmap Instructor Guide to make sure you understand and follow all the steps to set up the Roadmap correctly.
• Finalize everything in Moodle, especially dates and activity completion conditions, before creating a Roadmap activity.
• Avoid configuring a Roadmap during a live course. Work in a Project space to set up your Roadmap before implementing it in a live course.
• Have two windows open, or use two monitors if possible, so that you can look at the contents of the course while configuring the Roadmap settings.
• Decide on your preferred terminology and be consistent with labeling and icons.
• Use descriptive but concise information for titles and rollover text.
• Group multiple activities into Steps to streamline the appearance of the Roadmap.
• Click “Save Configuration” often!
• Test links carefully. (Beware of adding sections after starting a Roadmap configuration.)
• Double-check Roadmap dates and make sure they are consistent with Moodle activity dates.
• Provide a thorough explanation and demonstration of the Roadmap at the beginning of the semester. Emphasize using it throughout the semester.

Examples

Below is an example of what a Roadmap activity looks like in Moodle. The course learning objectives (CLOs) are listed at the top. Large headings with colored bars on the left side indicate phases. Each phase contains two cycles, which correspond to the modules in the course. Each cycle contains several steps, represented by icons that start out as grey and become filled with darker colors as a student completes activities.

Try out Roadmap for yourself!

Would you like to experience the Roadmap activity in a real Moodle space? When you self-enroll as a student in the Teaching With Moodle training, you’ll the Interactive Roadmap section near the top of the course. As you complete activities, you’ll see the icons get filled in with darker colors.