In Course Administration > Settings, you will find a series of course data such as its name or the category under which it appears, as well as other options that you can select or modify that will make the course function one way or another, such as format, tracking, or groups.

• With the course start date you can control when the activity of the course begins to be recorded. Also, when creating a new edition of a course by copying an existing one, moving this date will shift the due dates of assignments by the same number of days.
• The end date controls whether the student sees the course in their list of active courses. If enabled, once this date passes, the course will still be accessible to the student but will appear in their past courses. Additionally, this date can be used in some reports.
• The Course summary should provide an overview of the course objectives, or at least indicate what the course is about. This text is visible in the course list when browsing categories. Matches found in this summary will also be shown in course search results. 

This is the minimum; if you do not plan to change anything else and want to leave everything with the default course settings, save the changes by clicking Save changes and display.

Course Format

The course format area, which we can open by clicking on it, allows us to choose what type of course we are going to develop. The options we have are several:

• Folders
• Single activity
• Social
• Topics
• Weekly

For each format, we will have different options, although generally what they control is whether hidden sections (topics, weeks, folders) are collapsed or invisible, and the course pagination (if you use Boost as the theme, you can choose between having everything on one page or one topic per page; using Snap only allows the second option).

Appearance

In this section, we could force the theme in which the course is presented to users. This option must be allowed from administration and is most likely disabled.

You could also force the language. When might this option be useful? For example, in language courses where we want the course interface (buttons, options, etc.) to appear in the language being taught or in environments with courses for foreigners. From the dropdown, we can choose from the languages enabled on the server which one we want to use in the course.

The news items indicate how many news posts students will see on the course homepage.

The next two control whether the student can see the course gradebook and reports of their activity for the course. These reports are always visible to the teacher regardless of what is chosen here.

Files and Upload

With this dropdown, we limit the maximum file size that users can upload to the course by default. It can then be edited for each specific activity (for example, if a video needs to be uploaded in some activity, it would be useful to increase this number). The maximum size we can select here is the maximum specified by the administrator.

Completion Tracking

By enabling this option, we allow data to be collected on the completion of activities by students. This completion can later be configured with a series of default options and then for each activity in the course, and can even be disabled for those that do not require it.

Groups

The options in this section manage the type of groups formed in the course. We have three options:

• No groups: all students work separately
• Separate groups: each group works on its own and does not see the other groups
• Visible groups: groups work on their own but can see the other groups

Keep in mind that these same options are also available for activities, so you can leave the option as "no groups" at the course level and then activate groups for activities that require it.

We can force the group mode to use the option chosen here for all activities instead of allowing the choice for each one.