What is it?

The Announcement Forum News Slider allows tutors and course administrators to highlight course announcement posts to students. 

Note: This feature does not work with "Tabs format". We recommend you use the collapsed topics or weekly formats in your course if you want to use it.

The Announcement Forum News Slider has two functions:

1) It displays an aggregated collection of the latest 7 unread course announcements (from all enrolled courses) for both students and staff on the Moodle MyHome page, all postings have a default expiry date of 7 days from the time of posting.

2) The Announcement Forum News Slider can be set up by course administrators upon individual courses to display that specific courses new announcement forum posts.

Why use it?

It provides a simple but modern way to highlight course announcements.

How do I set one up?

The slider appears at the top of a Moodle course. When you Turn Editing On you will see a greyed out hashed box at the top of your Moodle course with the words "Course page slider region", as shown in the image below.

This grey block is purely a holding block area for the Announcement Forum News Slider block and is not used unless the block is added to the course via the instructions below.

1) Go to the course that you wish the Announcement Forum News Slider to appear on.

2) Click the Turn editing on button

3) Locate in the right hand block area the Add a block block

4) From the Add a block block select the News Slider block

5) The Announcement Forum News Slider will now have been added to your right hand Moodle block menu. An example is shown below, however your block may appear empty at first. 

Configuring the Announcement Forum News Slider block

Below are the configurations that will require to be set when the block is first setup. While there are other configuration options listed on the block configuration page, we advise against changing the defaults.

1) Click the small cog icon in the upper right of the Announcement Forum News Slider block. 

2) Click Configure News Slider block. This will take you to the blocks configuration page.

3) On the block configuration page, you can rename the News Slider by changing the Left Banner title to something more appropriate for you course e.g. Course Announcements or Course News. This will change the text in the orange block.

4) Change the News content display toggle to Course News Only. This ensures that only the specific announcements for the course you are on are shown in the block. Otherwise announcements from other courses may be shown also.

5) Click on the arrow next to the Where this block appears to access additional settings that must be configured. 

6) Change the Default region to Course page slider region  (This is the grey space now located at the top of your Moodle course).

7) Click on the arrow next to the On this page to drop down this section.

8) Change the Region to Course page slider region  (This is the grey space now located at the top of your Moodle course).

9) Both options together should look like this:

10) Click the button Save Changes located at the bottom of the block configuration page

11) Your Announcement Forum News Slider should now be configured.

Further Information

If you have no posts on your Moodle course (or all posts in your announcement forum are older than 7 days), the Course page slider region will appear empty (see picture below).  The Course page slider region now has a Cog for the configuration of the Announcement Forum News Slider block.

Once a post is made (and released). The news slider will publish and display as show below.