Hello,
I am wondering how people have represented student services such as Dyslexia, Library and student technical resources within a Moodle environment. We are looking to deploy a 2.5 installation and feel we are in a good position to re-evaluate how we currently do them. Currently they are setup within a course page and resources are added listed down the page. They are all open courses.
Any information or ideas would be very much appreciated.
Hi,
Don't do what I did.
We have a few areas like this in our Moodle. Things that aren't technically courses but are using Moodle courses like an intranet page. We're actually about to rip all these areas out of our Moodle and move them to another CMS.
Our problem was that we let any college department request a 'non-course' like this, and we added all students to these courses. We've now got about 70 of the damn things. We've got a custom navigation block on our Moodle that hides these courses under a separate sub-menu, but when students log in via the mobile app, they see this:
This is horrific. You can't see the scroll bar here, but this is less than a fifth of the courses in that sidebar. It's making it hard to navigate our Moodle, because actual academic units (which students need to use) are being drowned out by all this stuff.
Our new strategy is this: actual academic courses go in Moodle. Anything else can go somewhere else. I don't care where, just as long as it's not cluttering up my Moodle.
I'd like to know more about what it means to you (and to your colleagues) to "represent" those services. There are 2 ways to go here - representing the services of those offices within existing courses, or representing their offices as courses (which is what you're currently doing).
In my opinion, the Moodle-as-Intranet idea works poorly. We rely on MyMoodle heavily, and do not encourage people to go browsing for courses, so an office Moodle page isn't easily findable. (YMMV.) The big question, to me, is what specific Moodle tools these offices want to use. If there isn't an answer (or if there are other tools available which could accomplish the job), maybe it's not a good fit.
We've had a little bit of luck with library resource metacourses - any student in any Psychology class can see the Psychology resource page. I'm still of mixed mind on this solution. On the one hand, it does show up as a Moodle resource when the student logs in, and the student is the primary audience. On the other hand, it's hidden to students/faculty/librarians doing interdisciplinary work in other departments. This has led the librarians to generally prefer their own CMS.
On the other hand, there are a number of approaches to embedding student services within a Moodle page. A lot of people have worked on library blocks, for example. You can do a heck of a lot with a simple HTML block or an RSS block - I could imagine providing blocks for advising, services to students with disabilities, the writing center, etc. It might be more useful for students to see the services as an integral part of their course page instead of a separate thing.
For that matter, there's no technical reason that librarians, advising, and student life staff can't have appropriate access to Moodle pages. (There may be policy and local culture reasons.) If it would help those offices provide services more effectively, you could embed them in the course with appropriate permissions. We've done this with great success with library services.
