Moodle community sites

Using Moodle Course

I would recommend breaking the Using Moodle into a lot of courses, one for each topic that currently exist (or something like that).

At the top in section 0 add icons driven menu for each subsequent topic?

Each topic in that course being single focus on one issue, something like

• Name -  Assignment module
• Label - 1 liner description on it taken from Docs
• Forum - Discussion on Assignment Module
• Documentation Link - Link to Moodle Docs page for the assignment

Just my 2 cents.

+1 for thread for thread subscription

Hi Helen,

Just as an idea getting the forums closer to the front page and making them more obvious I think would be beneficial.
Getting to the list of forums I find useful (the using moodle forums) leads me through 4 pages and the forums page (moodle.org/forums) I think is very confusing.

A cool idea would be to get a list of forums the user has participated in onto the top navigation. I find I am always going back to the same 2 or 3 forums and it would be great to have a quick way to get to forums I am interested in. (This sort of comes back to the above idea that presently its a task to get to a forum).

Cheers
Sam

I just posted an hour ago in a forum on a significant request to look at some ideas for improving UI.  It was in the developers forum because (obviously) it is poor practice to post all over the place, and developers feedback was looked for, but this developers conversation will also interest other people who have UI interests or even just to say +1 or -1 - especially as there was a real mockup to look at.  I missed this at the time.

All this to say: I'm interested in being able to keep up with discusions about feature improvements.  But it is hard and I do waste time.  By way of illustration, there are four discussions on at the moment that I have dipped into in the last week. 

• Useability changes to Forms.  
• Forums enhancement in 2.3.  
• Warning users before moving away from Forms. 
• And Mary's welcome post enhancing the use of the Lounge on the topic of deleting behaviours in sections. 

These discussions are scattered all over Moodle.org and the Tracker.  I'm interested in all these aspects.

Parenthetically, I'm not even sure of the status of these posts.  Are they 'official' discussions or just musings aloud that may help some local hack get sorted and will not actually advance Moodle core yet? How do you know you are in a real conversation?

I'm also aware of the developer/designer/user difference in type of infomation and level of engagement.  I have worked with users that will engage in conversations, and even answer questions but not at the cost of 22,000 posts in just a few months.

So for this question we could consider:

1. Some sort of stream twitter like feed of "new discussions about features and so on" that links to the various discussions
   Or a static page of links . . .
   OR
2. A forum of it's own.  "Current discussions about Moodle futures" built around links to docs, etc etc.  It could even just have links to verious places where the conversations are happening.
   When I have done this in the past I have even had several Phases: "New spec for Forms handling DRAFT 1"  "Forms Handling mockup for feedback" "Final version out, comment on implementation"
3. ??  TAGS ??

And firm moderation.  Shift and move discussions to DONE forum, "OK, discussion OVER we have finished coding, problems now to Tracker", or "This next month we want feedback on this spec, please have your say".  Or whatever.

This is one aspect of something I feel strongly about Helen.  Forum functionality in Moodle.  eg.  No permalinks to be able to accurately and easily point to a post.  The "Subscribe at discussion level" you mention.  The inability to post while seeing the whole thread.  No save drafts option.  All of which are in ForumNG.  Admins being able to push posts out to people.  <off soapbox now>

Good luck with this.

-Derek

I'm not sure that reducing the number of forums would make things easier for anyone, newcomer or oldtimer. If anyting, it is likely to make things messier if several forums for designated components are integrated into one big forum (e.g. Contributed plugins) or spread over several courses.

Newcomers may benefit from a few-steps wizard to guide them to the right place in first encounters.

Oldtimers have their routines. My routine, for example, is the following. I'm not subscribed to any forum, there is one forum I always check for new posts, and for the rest I scan the recent activity block a few times a day.

So improvements to the recent activity block may be helpful:

• Show the forum name for each entry
• Allow sorting (and categorizing) by forum
• Allow clearing the block content (currently I must log out and log back in to clear the list)

One other possible improvement, already mentioned by Sam, would be a link to the 'using moodle' forums on the front page - not in a menu, but rather a big theme-dependent-color-or-image button, so that I click once and I'm there.

Or perhaps the recent activity block on the front page after login.

Forums are the heart of moodle.org so the attention should be paid there primarily IMHO. Beside per-thread subscription (which is really a must for moodle.org) I would welcome using per-thread and per-post tags. That way, threads might be tagged in the same manner as GMail uses labels for emails, for example. Ideally there are system/forced tags applied by moderators that are displayed to all users and then individual tags set and visible by a given user only.

Alternatively, instead of full support for individual tags, we might at least offer a functionality similar to the star in GMail or a flag in the Quiz module. So users might mark a thread or post as "starred" and then there would be a page that displayed such posts/threads only.

Automatic resizing of image attachments to a reasonable thumb-like size would be nice, too.

Read the earlier replies and agree with thread subscription context addition to Forums.  I like scrolling down the list of forums, but perhaps placing them in a few more courses would be productive.  

What about a tool to help those who are interested in finding the right forum: a decision tree with multiple choices.   For example a Lesson, drilling down to (or along the way seeing) a link to the best forum and perhaps MoodleDoc page.  

Just a thought.   I have been in general problems forum quite a bit recently because I am not sure where else to go.   That is the end of my decision tree

Chris

Fewer forums would be nice. Perhaps five or so English-language forums divided by audience?

Teachers and administrators (general usage)
System administrators (configuration and performance)
Theme designers
Moodle programmers (working on core system or on plugins)
Feature request discussion

--sam

PS I didn't forget students, but not sure moodle.org hosts student discussions? If it does, obviously that would be another forum.

Everybody can assume that thread/discussion subscription is going to be possible soon.

Likewise, these forums are not the place to discuss individual feature requests and bugs: the Moodle Tracker is clearly the best place for that.

Contrib plugin discussions should probably be attached to each Moodle plugins page.

Personally I think we can do with much fewer forums if these are assumed, which would vastly simplify moodle.org in general and make it much more friendly as a place for community support and general brainstorming.

Hi Helen, hallo everbody

I never visit this forum, I guess the term "design" in the title sounds to me like a never ending discussion on color! I had a suggestion to alleviate the problem visitors have in finding the correct forum which I posted in the Facilitators Corner, and was directed here.

Considering the scrope of the OP, I'm surprised at the small number of replies.

On Wed 15 Feb 2012 08:28 UTC Helen Foster wrote:
>
> We're planning a big redesign of moodle.org in the next few months (including a new theme) and would really like your ideas and suggestions of how to improve the site.

It is about the whole moodle.org, right? Isn't that a broad topic? I mean, from my end, http://moodle.org has seven menu headings having three to eight menu items each. Just one of them, http://moodle.org/forums/, branches to nine courses in english, not counting the 35 odd other language courses. Out of those nine courses in english I have been to perhaps 5 forums in the course "Using Moodle" and occationally to the social forum in the course "Lounge". Therefore my feedback is so narrow, I don't really know how useful it is for the whole picture.

Here are the places where I see a need for improvements, together with suggestions:

1. Visitors posting in the wrong forum in Using Moodle
Yes, this is a problem. Things we can do:
- compile a structured overview of all the forums. Ideally the names of the forums should be explanatory, but they are not. Example: Looking for an internet hoster the right forum is "Hardware and Performance". Here is a highly efficient solution: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/ (on that single page you see the name of each forum, a description, names of the moderators, no. of discussions, no. of posts, the last post by whom, time - for all forums! One click to filter for active topics and unanswered topics.)

2. The number of forums in Using Moodle
"We need more forums" or "We need less forums" is the wrong approach. The right one IMHO would be,

a. compile the "overview" in 1. above.

b. Go through the definitions list and see whether the "organic growth" has _obvious_ mistakes, looking at the detailed description., just study how the pieces of the puzzle fits together.

c. Please don't let "advisors" to take over. Let the people who know the stuff in "their" respective forums and as a result actively contribute in those, decide. In other words, the "number" of forums is not something the "managers" plan at the drawing board but evolve depending on the people you have on the front.

d. More discipline on the part of the moderators. Don't try to be "nice" and keep on talking in the wrong place, ... There is a short http://docs.moodle.org/en/Moodle.org_forums_Code_of_Conduct. You just have to implement it!

Non-topics for me (in this discusson)
- Theme! Ever found two people agreeing on a color? Let the theme being the standard theme of the latest stable version of Moodle. Period.

- More features: I have met people who need a number of features to get productive. Give them ten, they wait for the eleventh. I guess they are still waiting - and it is my fault!

- Usability. "Usability is what you are used to!"

- More search capabilities, couple to Google, etc. No, there is an excellent search facility in Moodle, just use it. If selecting the forum from a drop down list is too much for somebody, why does he teach? On top of that, we don't want to send the whole Moodle community in to the "filter bubble", do we?

- Design moodle.org for people whose horizon is the bottom of their screens (go below that, they die a "scroll of death!").

Hi Helen

Do we have usage statistics of the individual forums in 'Using Moodle', figures like no. of hits, no. of posts, no. of subscribers?

Hi Helen,

While the discssion so far has concentrated on the forums - although that's definitely the part of moodle.org I use the most, I don't think I really have much to add to that discussion beyond the importance of not separating discussions into beginner/advanced or developer/admin/teacher - how many times do we see beginners become regular forum contributors, how else do many teachers become small scale system admins and begin to become a developer etc. except through learning through the community? How else to developers stay in touch with the problems experienced by a new user? I think one of the strengths of the community forums is the interaction of everyday users and regular enthusiasts and the developers.

 

My main point was - in this reorganisation, don't leave out the other main area of the site - Docs. Again, I don't have much to say to move the discussion forward in this case - primarily because I find the right/best Docs so difficult to find that I rarely use them. I rely so much on links other people post in the forums or using the Moodle search - which then provides me with links to pages and pages of search results, sometimes going back several years and relating to older versions of Moodle (as in 1.6/1.7 on one recent occasion) and a complete mix of forum posts and Docs.

There has to be a better way of organising these docs - or maybe not the Docs themselves, but a front end for them that enables both searching and browsing through some sort of index tree? I'm thinking not so much of the developers and of the regular users, but of the people who come to the site wanting their first few steps guided through. I'm also thinking of myself and how I prefer to learn new information - when I need to find something specific the search tool is OK, but I also want to learn more about other parts of Moodle and there is another reason for a browsing style of entry to the docs.

More and more I think 'new' users are resorting to posting direct to the forums for the same information over and over because the Docs are not obvious to find/read. In most cases the information is there, in the docs, but it is then having to be pointed out again and again to different users. Yes, perhaps people should make better use of the search facillities and do more digging themselves, but I also realise that as an ex-full time teacher, who at the time was also taking his first steps in admininstering the school site and in developing and so on - a situation many of our newer community members are in - time is a precious commodity and one that we would win many friends if we could minimise that time spent finding important information.

I'm afraid at 5am I don't have solutions to suggest, but perhaps an opening to widen the discussion beyond just the forums

Richard

Talking of website design, this article http://websitehelpers.com/design/ is a gem. Especially the section F "Make it Easy to Find Stuff", points F1 and F2 in particular, are relevant to the discussion.