This year brings us a new version of Moodle and while there are many improvements some areas may appear lacking. One area of concern to tutors in particular has been how courses are listed in the dashboard, and issues with the My Courses drop-down list.
There seems to be an issue showing all the courses in the drop down My courses menu item for users with a large number of course pages available. It seems the maximum this can be set to is 150 course pages which is not enough for some tutors who have access to a wide range of pages (this problem is unlikely to be an issue for students as the number of course pages accessed will be lower). Because the dashboard doesn’t show the courses very usefully either, this can cause some users to believe they no longer have access to courses. Access has not changed, but the course pages just do not appear in the My Courses list.
To help with this I have added an optional block that users can add to their dashboard. The block is called “My enrolled courses”. By default it is a simple list of every course page you are enrolled on. It is possible this too is limited in the number of course pages it can show (but I have not established this). However this block can be modified. At the bottom of the list is a link that says Show/Hide courses. Following this link you are presented with a screen where you can move courses between shown and hidden. This does not effect the course page itself, but only determines if the page will be shown in the block. Using this block enables people to hide all pages apart from the ones they regularly use.
The video below demonstrates adding the block to your dashboard and customising it to show only some course pages and moving it to the main right pane.
Hopefully this will be useful for those users experiencing difficulties with the course lists.
REMEMBER: This block will not change the order or look of the My Courses drop down or anything else. Hiding or showing courses in this block ONLY affects which courses appear in the block itself.