I have a customer who is currently using a Blackboard solution which my company designed. They would like us to develop a new solution using Moodle so that we can customize it more.
The first obstacle I see pertains to overall course layout. In their existing system, each course has a menu on the left-hand side which consists of a set of large colored buttons in a vertical arrangement. Items on the menu typically consist of: Announcements / Course overview / Documents / Exams / Support. As the student clicks different items from this menu, the main content of the page changes accordingly, but the menu itself always remains visible. The instructor of a given course has the ability to determine which page will be the default landing page for that course; in other words whether the announcements appear on first visiting the course, or the overview, etc.
I have only begun evaluating Moodle over the last couple of days, and am not yet familiar with all of its native features, not to mention all the existing plugins, so I may easily be missing something. But so far, it is hard for me to see how I could duplicate this arrangement in a Moodle site. It seems to be the fundamental paradigm of course layout in Moodle that all the main types of content are visible at once.
For example I am looking at the "Water!" demo course. There are lots of blocks going down the left and right sides. There is a block on the left with a menu of activities such as Assignments, Glossaries, Lessons etc. But if I click one of these, I get to a page with a completely different layout and the same menu is no longer visible.
I see that Moodle has the concept of "course formats" but the format of a course (i.e. topical, weekly, social etc.) seems to pertain only to the layout of the main central section - the layout of the page as a whole, with the columns of blocks on left and right, seems to be constant.
I would be grateful if anyone can give me suggestions or information on how I can design a Moodle site to match the basic layout of my customer's existing Blackboard site. If that requires using a plugin, that is OK. If I would need to write a plugin of my own, that is OK too, although not the desired solution. If it requires making changes to the Moodle core code, well, I don't know...
P.S. Sorry if this is not the right forum for this kind of question.
Update: I am looking into FlexPage - it seems like it might meet our needs. If anyone has any other suggestions though, I would appreciate them.
I was going to suggest that - glad you found it, as it sounds like your project is the kind of thing flex page was designed for - originally it was built (on Moodle 1.6
for Intel Education - for a series of courses with a fixed left menu, top tabs, to help students navigate though content rich courses.
Intel made sure it was all open source and publically released so that others with similar requirements could benefit.
Let me know if you have any questions, etc. And best of luck with your project
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Intel made sure it was all open source and publically released so that others with similar requirements could benefit.
Let me know if you have any questions, etc. And best of luck with your project
Just because you are familiar with one approach it does not make it the best way to do something. (Although I know how difficult it can be to tell a client that.)
The Moodle course page is intended to organise the parts of the course into the order in which the student needs to access it. That is why we have topics an weeks format, and each section can contain the things you need when studying that topic / in that week. That is really very nice from the student's point of view.
I speak as someone which has studied OU courses which make good use of Moodle's layout. I have also studied OU courses where they put all the reading matter in a 'Course materials' area, and the activities in a separate area, and it sucks.
So anyway, I encourage you to persuade your client that the Moodle way of doing things is better. But, good luck with that
The Moodle course page is intended to organise the parts of the course into the order in which the student needs to access it. That is why we have topics an weeks format, and each section can contain the things you need when studying that topic / in that week. That is really very nice from the student's point of view.
I speak as someone which has studied OU courses which make good use of Moodle's layout. I have also studied OU courses where they put all the reading matter in a 'Course materials' area, and the activities in a separate area, and it sucks.
So anyway, I encourage you to persuade your client that the Moodle way of doing things is better. But, good luck with that
Despite Tim's somewhat limited approach here..
there are plugins that will do what you want. Perhaps the most obvious is the Book, it is accessed as any other resource but it does have the menu structure on the left if you want it.
Tim's point about changing perceptions, particularly of bureaucrats being pretty near impossible is right though, so I would also suggest you are fighting an uphill battle. If you think that Moodle is a more valuable option, then talk about cost effectiveness and rapid adaptation to changing to market conditions. That always grabs attention. Flexibility of ownership, as opposed to licensing is another thing they will listen to. Ease of use, logical structuring are of no consequence - after all, it is Students who are going to use the tool, not the bureaucrats.
there are plugins that will do what you want. Perhaps the most obvious is the Book, it is accessed as any other resource but it does have the menu structure on the left if you want it. Tim's point about changing perceptions, particularly of bureaucrats being pretty near impossible is right though, so I would also suggest you are fighting an uphill battle. If you think that Moodle is a more valuable option, then talk about cost effectiveness and rapid adaptation to changing to market conditions. That always grabs attention. Flexibility of ownership, as opposed to licensing is another thing they will listen to. Ease of use, logical structuring are of no consequence - after all, it is Students who are going to use the tool, not the bureaucrats.
Many of the OU courses I see on open learn actually use an approach that seems similar (to me) to flex page with the next and previous buttons in resourcesn provide the feeling of navigation through changn content within a persistent interface - done though by writing custom links into the resource rather than through the forms based UI that flexpage uses.
Open learn courses are laid out differently from OU courses in our VLE.