This study investigated the utilization of various types of Moodle course materials (including resources and activities) by 190 Chinese students from five classes of an English-medium instruction (EMI) course, their views regarding the utilization, and their academic achievements. It aimed at finding out the types of Moodle course materials positively associated with students' learning achievements, and identifying the specific features and practices with the course materials that might contribute to the learning effectiveness. Data were collected from an in-class survey, focus group interviews, and retrieval of Moodle activity logs and grade reports. Of the types of Moodle course materials that were found to have students' access frequencies significantly correlated with their course total scores, comments from focus-group data that were related to the effective utilization were analysed using an inductive approach. Then the emergent themes were mapped on to the headings ''appropriate resources and tools," "integrative multimodal tasks," and "sustainability beliefs and practices" for establishing guiding principles for designing blended-learning content courses for second/foreign language learners. This article suggests that EMI course instructors consider offering learning scaffolding through various means and providing supports when students are interacting with the learning management system, in particular when they are dealing with assessments.