General help

This is something that I've picked up on which people really want to see in Moodle. In fact, I've been had it that people have flatly refused to accept that the same interface could the mode of interacting both for the student and the teacher/admin and I have ended up creating a sort of dashboard that appears in place of the course list on the index page.

So for me, this would be a huge UX improvement, and what's better, it could be bolted on the existing set-up with only minor changes to what's already there to hide the settings block and other navigation links to reports if using the dashboard. So it shouldn't need a vast amount of regression testing.

I would suggest that a natural alternative to the current state of affairs would be to present the users with the dashboard as their home page if they have been assigned roles that have the dashboard capability assigned in any courses or at any level.

One of the major strengths of Moodle is the detailed settings of capabilities - I'm not sure if other CMS have anything like this. The dashboard could also be stripped down to very little for admins who have few 'capabilities', only read access to reports for instance, and scaled up to the whole depending on what they are able to do.

This would make it a much more attractive proposition for people who might spend just, say, 2% of their working time using Moodle to do very little. Every extra click makes it less likely that they will see Moodle as exacting only this very minimal use of their time and more likely that it will seem to balloon out as they have to forge a way through the course structure to get to the reports they want.