As you prepare to consider your user experience, take a moment to reflect on how the user experience affects the student's ability to learn. You'll want to keep the learning objectives and outcomes first and foremost in the learner's mind. Then, you'll want to ensure that you clearly map the learning objectives to the course content, activities, and assessment. They need to make sense, and your learner should have an idea of how the activity or content will lead to the ability to perform the task and demonstrate skill or mastery.

An easy way to maintain mindfulness of the user experience is to think of the mnemonic CORN:

C  Clear: Your outcomes should be clear, as should the process of working through the course. Think of a map and how it guides one to a final destination. A clear map contains just the right amount of information, is not superfluous, and provides help when needed.

O  Outcome-focused: Ensure that you're always tied to the learning outcomes, which are clearly stated at the outset. Then, ensure that each unit or module also contains objectives. Also ensure that you organize your course in a way that provides sufficient scaffolding so that the sequence makes sense.

R  Relevant: Although it can be interesting to include materials or activities that are not totally related to the course as enrichment, keep in mind that you could confuse or derail the student. The material should tie directly to the learning outcomes and should help students successfully complete the assessments. Likewise, the assessments need to be relevant and meaningful.

N  Needs-based: Provide the tools your students need to be able to perform their tasks. Also, ensure that their learning preferences are acknowledged and you're focused on meeting their needs. A prime determinant of user satisfaction is the degree to which the student feels in charge of their own destiny, something that requires one to develop a high degree of self-efficacy and an "I can do it!" attitude. Further, to motivate your students, you'll need to satisfy their needs. They may need a sense of recognition, and so building in rewards and recognition will be part of the way you configure your site.

In this chapter, we're focusing on the settings. Later, we'll go into more depth about how to design and arrange the content, activities, and assessments.

In all of these, you have choices.

Many of the choices in settings that you make will be easy to decide. For example, will you allow your users to select their own time zone? Other choices are not so obvious. You can spend a lot of time trying different settings to see how they affect the user experience. These are the settings that we will focus on in this chapter. The goal is to save you time by showing you the effects that key settings will have on your site.

Even if you did not install Moodle or are using MoodleCloud instead of Moodle on-premise, we encourage you to read the configuration sections in this chapter. If you want, work with your system administrator to select the settings that you want. Your administrator can create a site administrator account that you can use for configuring Moodle, or they can make these configuration settings for you.