Courses and course formats

I agree with you Jeff. That was my first impression when I first saw Moodle. Later, I've become used to it but I can see how other people might find it hard to get used to it.

I like the organization by topics, personally, but instead of (or besides) making them collapsible, I think a better solution would be to be able to embed other pages similar to the main course pages (i.e. with the same basic look and functionalities) under links within a given topic.

So, for instance, imagine you have a topic block named 'Week 3' or 'team work' or whatever. Within this block you have a few resources (e.g. some text or html document with instructions), plus a forum plus whatever else you want. Then imagine that you can have a link inside this block with a name such as 'activities for Week 3' or 'team activities' which, when clicked on, takes you to a page with a number of blocks where you have different activities, e.g. 'Quizzes for Week 3', 'wikis to do X', etc. Or another link that is named 'forums' and it takes you to a page with a number of forums organized tematically. Since in my proposal the embedded pages would have basically the same structure and functionalities as the main course page, you could organize these embedded pages with whichever combinations of resources and activities you wanted.

I think this could help to reduce the "length" of the course pages considerably besides making the organization of courses more efficient and flexible.

I guess one could achieve this same effect by creating a metacourse and making all those links take you to daughter courses, but I think that is too cumbersome. I don't see why one couldn't do this within the same course.

Josep M.