Moodle manages activities and stores resources in courses, and this is where learning and collaboration takes place. Courses themselves belong to categories, which are organized hierarchically, similar to folders on our local hard drive. Moodle comes with a default category called Miscellaneous, which is sufficient to show the basics of courses. We will deal with categories in more detail in Chapter 4, Course Management.

To begin with, let's create the first course. To do so, go to Courses | Manage courses and categories. Here, select the Miscellaneous category. Then, select the Create new course link, and you will be directed to the screen where course details have to be entered. For now, let's focus on the two compulsory fields, namely Course fullname and Course shortname. The former is displayed at various places in Moodle, whereas the latter is, by default, used to identify the course and is also shown in the breadcrumb trail.

For now, we leave all other fields empty or at their default values and save the course by clicking on the Save changes button at the bottom.

The screen displayed after clicking on Save changes shows enrolled users, if any. Since we just created the course, there are no users present in the course yet. In fact, except the administrator account we are currently using, there are no users at all on our Moodle system. So, we leave the course without users for now and add some users to our LMS before we come back to this screen (select the Home link in the breadcrumb).