I am thinking of working on (or paying a skilled programmer to work on) a course creation wizard for K12 teachers.
I am envisioning a series of screens that walks a teacher through some options and shows examples of how the course looks. (weekly vs topics, setting up groups for periods, setting up gradebook options).
Also since K12 teachers tend to think in terms of assignments/gradebook having a gradebook set up page where they can quickly enter in a list of assignments and their front page will automatically be populated with the assignments in the right topics.
I would also like to give the teachers the ability to move lots of files from their computer to the correct sections of their Moodle page (sure now they can zip, upload, and unzip, but they still have to manually create each resource). Kind of a visual drag and drop or a multi-upload for each section.
Any other ideas for features? Any tools like this already out there? Any estimates on how many coding hours this might take?
Hi Colin:
I was searching with the same topic and found this old discussion thread. I did some research and found this other discussion thread:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=7698#p739295
But the project seems to be dead? Also did a search with the Modules and plugins database and couldn't find it there either.
There is another slightly different approach, which is to use a "course template", see the discussion here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=43260
There is another open-source LMS project called "Canvas" by Instructure. They seem to have a very straight-forward "course creation wizard" and very "Web 2.0" like (response time is very good). Maybe some developer in the Moodle community would be interested to create such a "course creation wizard" for beginner Moodle users (teachers)?
It is important that Moodles aspirations are not hidden behind the "scroll of death". I just took a look at the course creation page and it has around 29 separate data entry fields. Two of the sections have no help button (force language anyone?). Some of the help button content on other fields are a little cryptic. UI matters.