The Preferences page gives you easy access to a range of settings that you may want to personalise. It can be accessed directly from the user menu at the top right of the Moodle interface by clicking on your name.

What is displayed on the Preferences page may vary depending on the permissions you have in Moodle but it will look something like this:

User account

Edit profile

This option allows you to personalise the information that staff and students at Warwick see about you when they login to Moodle. It can include where you are located, some background information about yourself and contact details such as your Skype ID.

Preferred language

Using this option you can set the language that the Moodle menus display in; the choices are currently German, French and Spanish. The actual course content e.g. quizzes, lesson handouts or links to websites will remain in English.

Forum preferences

The Email digest type determines how often you receive notifications from forums that you are subscribed to. You can choose to receive messages individually or combined together in just one notification.

Forum auto-subscribe lets you decide if you want to automatically subscribe to forums that you post messages to.

Forum tracking will allow you to highlight the posts you have not yet read; this should make keeping track of new messages much easier.

When sending forum post notifications is similar to the field above; when you post a message to a forum, it is marked as read/unread, making message management easier.

Editor preferences

Leave this setting as Default editor (which at Warwick is Atto HTML editorLink opens in a new window) unless you particularly want to change to the TinyMCE HTML editor.Link opens in a new window

Course preferences

Ignore this option unless you have editing rights to a Moodle space. If you do then when you click on the Add an activity or resource menu you can choose to have the items displayed as one long list or separated into activities and resources.

Calendar preferences

This allows you to control how you want the Moodle calendar to be displayed (if it has been added to your Moodle space). The fields are fairly self-explanatory.

Security keys

A security key (or token) enables other systems to access Moodle securely. Commonly RSS feeds will use security keys to set up a link with Moodle. In most cases you will not need to use this option.

Message preferences

Warwick Moodle users can send and receive private messages in Moodle. This is in addition to receiving notifications about assignments or forum posts. However, it should not be relied upon as very few people use it. If in doubt, message someone in Moodle via a discussion forum or email them outside of Moodle. If you really want to use private messaging, you can restrict who can send you messages (which is why it is not reliable) and how you receive notifications if you are sent a message here.

Notification preferences

This enables you to specify when and how Moodle sends you notifications for each of the activities you may be asked to undertake during your studies. These can range from notifications about a successful assignment submission to notifications about new posts to a discussion forum that you are subscribed to.

Notifications can be set to either On or Off and you can set preferences for Web and Email. Web means you will only receive notifications when you are in the Moodle interface. Email means you will only receive notifications via your Warwick email account. Online or Offline determines whether you receive notifications (either web or email) only if you are logged into Moodle or when you are logged out too.

Badges

You can manage and download your badges, set privacy levels and connect to your backpack from this section but be aware that we do not make a lot of use of badges at Warwick, so this section will not be particularly relevant to most users.

Repositories

Please ignore this section.

Blogs

You can set blog preferences and register external blogs within this section but once again be aware that we do not make a lot of use of Moodle blogs at Warwick, so this section will not be particularly relevant to most users.