Comparisons and advocacy

Marc, and Peter, I understand what you are getting at, and yes, there is the intellecutal laziness, if you like, of a Windoze user, which is where I get my perspective of how the word "intuitive" has become indistinct from "familiar" in the PC. 

Bottom line is that Moodle's days are numbered unless it lifts its game. OK, I know that Oz is a very small market, supplying probably less than 5% of Moodle's 60million odd users, not counting the sites not registered. However, if a product is successful in usurping Moodle, Blackboard, Sakai, D2L, killing Canvas before it gets established, wrecking EDU while in its infancy, in Australia, how long will it be before it reaches New Zealand, then east across the Pacific? If it gets into Europe, what is the main problem then? This is just business. It is not the product that is the threat, it is the idea the product represents. How long before someone picks up on it and pushes their product even further - it might already be happening.  

I doubt Moodle is ready to face this kind of competition, and unless it is brought to the attention of the devs, it is likely they will be standing there wondering if a Moodle 3.0 is even a remote possibility or unemployed or worse, they may even be unable to be upgraded. I love my Moodle, but it will be taken away from me, and that makes me unhappy. What is worse, Marc, the people I might have to fight are not those on the other side, but those with whom I should be aligned with. Either way, I am bound to lose, but Don Quixote has always been my hero..

Just thinking Peter: are you meaning Moodle core (ie out of the box) is fully useable in all but one of your clients?

And are you meaning in a software Useability sense or just "Easy to use" or 'fit for purpose'? 

-Derek

Tim, well done, thanks.  I do know the time it takes to look up and track this type of stuff.

I was going to post that I thought you were too hard in some of your earlier comments.  You are nearly in a unique situation.  You have been in Moodle HQ, a student and a core developer.  I'm not sure if you have ever eavesdropped on staff taining or been an admin for a core Moodle site.

You insitution has been in the lucky position of being able to enhance Moodle when it needs to.  Pedagogically you decide certain interactions are needed (like your study mode in UI) so you build NG (announced in 2009 https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=137549) User and admin things follow:  you build a new wiki, new course format, new Blog, three new questions types using drag and drop, reports, workflow etc.  It must be just different looking at others using core Moodle from your perspectice.  I was fooled by this: I met some gus from OU and heard about what they were doing pre-moodle and was impressed, then heard you had adopted Moodle (which in the early days in my country was a big plus) but then later, at aconferences, discovered the Moodle used by OU was not the Moodle I struggled with.  

Be that as it may, my list was just an indicative one.  I'm writing from the point of view of the basic user who is unable to do plugins for whatever reason.  I'll follow up on some of your comments.  Meanwhile:

1. ForumNG.  You are right of course.  A little bump: Why has no-one responded to my comment here suggesting how to proceed next: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-34144?focusedCommentId=182222&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-182222  (Busyness?  No-one noticed it?  It's a stupic suggestion?)
2. Themes: Point taken.  I'll create one later.  I did a comparison of some of the features in the docs: http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Standard_themes#Notes_on_individual_themes - the combination of CSS changes possible, logo and nothing quirky is rare.  
   The theme tracker item that has rocketed up to 30 votes in about that many days is this one, but it may be in hand: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-35434
3. Admin tools: like bulk course create.  The code has been there for years from a good source in the tracker.  MoodleHQ is just not prioritising this.  Took me a long time to realise this.  We live with this.  Mind you in a serindipity, I got an e-mail this morning back from Moodle on this issue from nearly a year ago!!  
4. Yes, Some of the other comments do sound like excuses.    
5. Some of the other points I will follow up on and create some focused tracker items.

Point taken about Martin.  This discussion has been traversed elsewhere. "the road map is pretty high level only, has only a small pending tray, and there is always a large number of items in people's minds and there is patchy visibility to outsiders"  I had not heard of Barbera (the link you post is possibly mistyped)  I'm not sure I am looking at speed.  I am looking at the smaller items, with disproportionate significance, within the general direction.

Anyway, I'll report back sometime.

-Derek

None of you guys know me, but I've been building moodle sites for my employer over the last several months and am about to move one from Desire2Learn over to moodle. I'm a joomla guy, so learning Moodle was an interesting experience. 

On the first site, in order to me more in control of the environment for the students, I actually used Joomdle to wrap moodle inside the Joomla site and used Jomsocial as the profile engine. IN the end, the students see ONLY what I want them to see, including only the topic area of the course (no top or side nav, no profiles, nothing else but the course content main column stuff).

The one benefit is I got a social area (which I was happy to see the students using!) and I was able to use the Joomla ACLs to limit students to different pages in Joomla (such as class mp3s or a live feed for online students that onsite students didn't see). Originally I was going to try all kinds of complicated groupings and multiple copies of the courses in Moodle and they just gave up the fight and went with joomla as the wrapper. 

In the end, I'm REALLY happy with the result. I acutally wish someone would write Moodle as a full Joomla component the way folks have done with things like open cart-where it FEELS native inside joomla and not just an iframe. Anyway, that's a long shot that's not likely to happen.

So, all that said, the things that I got hung up on were these:

(Keep in mind, I'm not schooled in all the plugins and work arounds that are available, this is from my perspective of being given the task to launch a new moodle install for our ministry school)

• The admin navigation is endless. In joomla there's a front end, and a back end and I work on both in 2 tabs in my browser. In moodle, there's a sea of endless items in the side bar, and if you've also got a course open, you get an endless list of topics that you keep having to collapse. I'd love to see a better way to handle the admin stuff. Maybe I just need to mess with it more and find a way to move the admin to one side and the course stuff to the other side, but I haven't tried that yet.
• The admin is so filled with setting screens that I can never remember where something is. I continually have to google stuff just to find where a setting was. Sometimes they're just stuck in odd places (like advanced or experimental). It's frustrating compared to Joomla, but then there are a zillion more actual settings in there. Still, I think it could be more thought out and better organized.
• Tied to this admin issue is the wiki. My problem with the wiki is it always assumed I knew WHERE something was and it only explained to me what it was used for. So when I went to try to set up groups and I wanted to hide groups from eachother, I went in circles before I finally found mention of a special setting to turn on an advanced option and then a check box would appear in the assignment edit screen. I wasted an hour figuring that one out. And that has happened several times. My coworkers have heard me yelling at the screen...JUST TELL ME WHERE IT IS ALREADY!!!!!
• The layouts are very limited. Why can't I add blocks to the center column? Why can't I make some home page content visible to ONLY the public, and then other content only visible to logged in users? There's a little class in there I found I could use to hide things from non-logged in users, but there's not class for logged in users. On our newest site I had to fake the front page using a css trick I won't go into, but it was a lot of hacking and experimenting just to get around a big limitation. The suggestion on the forums was to use those special personal home pages. That's great in theory, but some of our students are older. So now, they've got the Public home page and their My Home, and they aren't the same, but they're both in the navigation. Instant confusion, especially because My Home has things they'll never use on it. I completely hid My Home with CSS because it can't be turned off in the menu.
• No course "home" or "welcome" pages. On our second Moodle install (no joomla involved) I was trying to put a welcome message or video on the course home page when I realized, there is no course home page. The only way to do this is to try to hack one in with a label in the news or general activity area at the top of the course page. I gave up and just made a few activity entries instead and called it Course Information. I won't go into detail, and this one isn't a huge issue, it's just something that I got hung up on.
• Roles and permissions sometimes don't go far enough. I'd love to be able to set up a non-editing teacher but give them the ability to create SPECIFIC activities in the top block of a course. I don't want them to be able to delete or edit anything else, just create and edit something (such as post a video or text message). Instead, we had to set up a forum for them to post announcements and a welcome video to.
• No auto updates. I can't tell you how amazing it is to go into Joomla and click Update and have Joomla 2.6.7 updated to 2.5.8 in a matter of seconds. I know this is on the list, but it really should be pushed to the highest priority if possible. Build in a message that warns of specific changes if something might break. I know recently Joomla started adding 3.0 to the update screen, so you can see your 2.5.x updates or jump to 3. The warning there isn't strong enough, so you'd want to make sure your warnings are VERY strong so users don't get into bad situations.
• Installing plugins still requires ftp (as far as I can tell). In joomla, I can visit an install screen and choose a file on my mac and install it. Better yet, if I purchased a 3rd party plugin called Akeeba Backup, it gives me restore points. I can literally install something, BREAK the front of the site, go into the back and roll the site back to the point before the install happened. It's wonderful. Of course one should really do this on a dev copy first, but in a pinch, it's great if you've been stupid.
• Menus and navigation are disorganized and cluttered. I continually get stumped by the weird menus. Things show up in multiple places and blocks take googling to figure out why they are there and what they're for. I came from the joomla side of things and the menus there are 100% customizable. You can add side bar modules, tie them to a menu and turn them on, you can add or remove anything from any menu. The drawback, of course, is that you don't have ANYTHING in your menus if you don't first add them, so you might not want to go to that extreme if you're looking to attract new users. Or you set up a default menu and allow us to remove and add things we want. And I'm talking through a ui, not that text box in the theme settings window where you can create custom menu items by entering strings in a text box.
• A few other little things I'd love to see. We use the activity completion chart to monitor student progress. I'd love an override function on that that lets instructors check a box and make a note as to why it was overriden. Recently we had a glitch and an questionaire response wasn't being checked off. I had to figure out where in the database I had to go to fix it because there's no override.
• Bugs. There are a few, but with each new version, I'm seeing the ones I've encountered go away, which is great!

Anyway, I know this sounds like a gripe session, and my perspective is different from those who run massive schools with a real setup (we tend to not use grading much, and we don't do true quizes, rubric, etc), but I wanted to let you know what Moodle looks like from an "outsider" just getting into it from another platform.

That said, I ignore many of my joomla friends when they say "moodle is crap" because I know what they mean. They mean the admin is complex and the layout is very inflexible compared to joomla-but I have yet to find a learning component as extensive as moodle that's built for joomla.

We're sticking with it, mostly because #1 I usually find a workaround for most issues I run into and #2 WE can control the development. We're about to pay the poodll guy to modify his video plugin for us. If we were on a hosted system we simply couldn't do that.

Overall, I'm really happy with the power moodle provides, I just hope as it progesses, the layout and other features get some love and it really moves into a more modern feeling system.

hope that makes sense!