Royal Holloway Moodle: Login and How It Works

Moodle is where Royal Holloway actually teaches you once term starts: slides go up there, coursework goes in there, and marks come back there. It is also the system new students spend the first fortnight confused by, mostly because it overlaps with two other systems and nobody explains where the boundary sits. This covers logging in, what to do when your courses are missing, and which of your questions Moodle is not the answer to.

At a glance

• Address: moodle.royalholloway.ac.uk.
• Login: your college username in Microsoft form - abcd123@live.rhul.ac.uk - and the same password as eduroam, campus PCs and your email.
• What is in it: lecture materials, reading lists, announcements, coursework submission and assignment marks.
• What is not in it: your teaching timetable, your enrolment and your official results.
• Missing courses: normal before teaching starts. Departments publish each course when it is ready.

Logging in to Royal Holloway Moodle

Go to moodle.royalholloway.ac.uk and choose to log in. Royal Holloway signs you in through its Microsoft account, so the username is not just your seven-character college username on its own - it is that username with the live domain on the end:

• Username: abcd123@live.rhul.ac.uk, where abcd123 is the four letters and three numbers you were issued at enrolment.
• Password: your standard university password. It is the same one that gets you onto eduroam, onto a campus PC and into your student email. There is no separate Moodle password.

If the password is rejected everywhere rather than just in Moodle, the problem is your university account rather than Moodle, and the IT Service Desk is the place to take it. If it works elsewhere but not here, try a private browsing window first - a stale Microsoft session signed in as somebody else's account is the single most common cause, and it is very common on shared campus PCs.

Why your courses are not showing

This is the most-asked Moodle question of the first fortnight, and the answer is usually reassuring: an empty or half-empty My Courses list does not mean your registration is broken. Three separate things cause it.

• The department has not made the course visible yet. Each course is published by the department or tutor when it is ready for teaching, not when the year technically begins. Courses appearing in the days either side of the first teaching week is normal.
• The course does not use Moodle. Not every course at Royal Holloway runs through it. Some departments use their own arrangements for some modules, and those will never show up in your list.
• Your registration genuinely has not gone through. This is the rarest of the three, and it is the only one you can check yourself.

To tell them apart, open Campus Connect and look at the Study tab, which lists the courses you are actually registered on. If a course is there and you are inside the first week or two of teaching, wait - it is a publishing delay. If it is there and teaching has been running for a while with no Moodle presence, email your department and ask whether that module uses Moodle. If it is not in Campus Connect, that is a registration problem rather than a Moodle one, and your department or the student services team needs to fix it at that end.

The reverse happens too: a module you have dropped can linger in Moodle after you are un-enrolled. It is a known quirk, it is cosmetic, and Campus Connect is the system of record either way.

What actually lives in Moodle

Moodle is the delivery layer for teaching. Expect to find, per course:

• Lecture materials: slides, notes, recordings where your department records them, and any handouts.
• Reading lists: usually linked through to the library's list system rather than hosted as files.
• Announcements: the forum your tutor uses for course-wide messages, which usually emails you as well.
• Coursework submission: assignment drop boxes, typically with a plagiarism check attached, plus the deadline and any late-submission rules.
• Assignment feedback and marks: individual piece-by-piece marks and tutor comments.

Worth knowing: a mark in the Moodle gradebook is not your official result. Official, ratified results come through Campus Connect after the exam boards. Moodle marks are provisional, and it is routine for them to move.

Moodle, Campus Connect and the timetable system

Royal Holloway splits student life across three systems, and almost every "where do I find this" question is really a question about which one owns it.

• Moodle (moodle.royalholloway.ac.uk) - teaching. Materials, coursework, assignment marks.
• Campus Connect - your record. Enrolment, course registrations, personal and contact details, fees, and official ratified results.
• Web Timetables (webtimetables.royalholloway.ac.uk) - where and when. Your teaching timetable, with rooms.

The one that catches people out every year is the timetable. Your timetable is not in Moodle, and no amount of looking will put it there. It comes from a separate system with a separate interface, and you can subscribe to it so it lands in your own calendar instead of being re-checked every morning - the guide to finding your Royal Holloway timetable covers how, including what room codes like "EWD-1-04" mean and which building each one points at.

Is there a Moodle app?

Not a supported one. The generic Moodle mobile app exists in both app stores, but Royal Holloway IT Services does not support it, which means that if it misbehaves against the university's site there is nobody to escalate to. The supported route on a phone is simply the mobile browser at moodle.royalholloway.ac.uk - the site is responsive and perfectly usable for reading materials and checking a deadline between lectures.

RHUL Mobile is not a Moodle client and does not try to be. It covers the parts of campus life Moodle has nothing to say about: where the room is, when the bus goes, whether a washing machine is free.

Getting Moodle working in your first week

A short order of operations that avoids most of the confusion:

• Enrol first. Complete online enrolment through Campus Connect. Nothing downstream works properly until that is finished.
• Get onto eduroam. Same username and password, with @live.rhul.ac.uk on the end. If eduroam works, your credentials are fine and Moodle will accept them.
• Log into Moodle once, early. Doing it before you urgently need something means a login problem surfaces while the IT Service Desk is quiet rather than the night a deadline lands.
• Check Campus Connect's Study tab against what you expect to be studying, so any registration problem is caught in week one rather than week six.
• Find your timetable separately, and subscribe to it rather than re-checking the site. See the timetable guide.

Everything above is about your first fortnight, which the Welcome Week guide covers more broadly - registration, your student card, the freshers fair and where the rest of it happens.

Where to get help

This is an independent guide, not an official Royal Holloway page. For a login that will not work, the IT Service Desk is the right contact. For a course that is registered but missing, your academic department is. For anything about your registration itself, Campus Connect and student services own it. Interfaces and addresses do change between academic years, so if something here does not match what you are seeing, trust the official intranet over this page.