It's another MOOC player, but the design page of courses is pretty slick. All drag and drop with the tools always present. All the tools are the same, but the course construction process is some how deconstructed: start with a blank slate then add in elements, rearrange as necessary, organize into topics/lessons, etc.
Check out the video if you're interested, there are some really great ideas for a teacher-centric course format designed to facilitate course building.
Dear Joseph,
Interesting. From a course format point of view it is entirely possible to have drag and drop building functionality. It's just a matter of working out the changes that need to be done. As it stands this would be devising a way to have new drop targets for the activities and resources ('gadgets') with a new rendered menu shown only in editing mode. Perhaps with Moodle we would want to keep the sections, but perhaps they would be less defined.
With the functionality of the 'gadgets' then that is a matter for module creators.
Cheers,
Gareth
One interesting takeaway, this particular LMS does away with Pages, if that were the case in Moodle courses might look a lot difference. I wonder if anyone has ever turned off the Page mod/resource in Moodle and what impact did that have on course construction/look and feel?
Dear Joseph,
I think Moodle is operating at a larger level of granularity with courses containing more content. If they have no pages but just a flow of content on a single page then the scroll-of-death will creep in. Therefore Versal's methodology is more akin to a course being a module or part module in a physical 'course'.
I looked at how the drag and drop could be implemented and currently the code in the '/course/yui' folder and not down at the course format level - that is not to say that a format could replicate and adapt it though. Currently I'm still learning YUI so slightly out of my depth in this area, somebody like Davo Smith or Andrew Nicols would know what to do (or the authors of the current code ).
Cheers,
Gareth