Themes

My experience with docking blocks is that students accidentally do it, don't realize it and then ask me for help on why they can't see something that they used to be able to see.

It wouldn't bother me in the slightest if docking went away.

As a site administrator first and teacher second, I always dock my Navigation and Settings blocks (in that order).

It helps massively when trying to jump quickly to site admin or turning editing on when I know they will always be in the top left when I need them, irrespective of how far down a page I've scrolled.

I am primarily editing / helping other teacher's and their courses (many of whom seem content with scroll of death) and thus being able to access the key tools in the top left consistently is invaluable.

Just my 2c worth.

Cheers

Sam

Maybe I'm missing something, but having spent 10 minutes looking at the articles on Eliademy, I'm not convinced its interface is doing the same job as Moodle's blocks - it is a simpler interface because there is much less stuff in it. 

Personally, I find docking blocks incredibly helpful in reclaiming by screenspace, particularly on small screen laptops!  Yes, I recognise some users get lost with it, but my frustration there is not with the users, or with docking.  Really, what's missing is an ability for one user to have docking, while others don't.  It would be great to have as a user profile setting, rather than a blanket, all-on or all-off option.  Maybe it would also be helpful if, similar to locking blocks to prevent deletion, an admin had the option to lock docks and prevent docking?

I don't know how hard this would be to create, but I think removing it entirely from core code is misguided, as it helps both navigation and ease of use for some users.

All the best,

 

Lindy

I generally turn it off on our sites. I find the navigation block to be pretty confusing, and we hear that as well from students that they don't always understand the navigation or that it includes irrelevant links that are hard to remove from the block itself. Docking of other blocks is irrelevant if the course design takes into account what blocks are required for the student to move through the course effectively.

Most of the time in all courses we have just three blocks displayed, a custom navigation block that ties back into the student dashboard tools, the course completion block so that students can gauge their progress and the course settings block so that students can check grades.

 

It's a bit of a tangent but it seems that from a code development point of view Blocks are easier to create than Resource or Activity plugins. I'm not sure why this should be, I can't see any fundamental reason for it, but I think you'll find quite a few 3rd party Blocks that would have been better as Activities or Resources. And any move away from using Blocks will be resisted by people who need that functionality (though not necessarily in a block).

Personally I find it essential. So do many of the staff here. However, to my knowledge it is hardly used at all by the students.

It keeps several of my blocks (Admin/Navigation and a few custom ones) there for me regardless of the scroll of death that some of our tutors put in (despite the optional course formats they have available!) and regardless of the number of sideblocks they may have in their courses beyond the default ones on our system. The only time I dont use the dock is when I am using a theme like Decaf/Krystle with the awesomebar locked at the top.

I can see that it may not be useful on small screens and that different ways of displaying blocks and navigation and so on are needed on small screens, but for me - well, my use of the mobile/small screens I've got is about zero tbh and I tend to use Moodle's built in device detection to serve a suitable theme to mobile devices rather than expecting a single theme to handle everything from my large widescreen to a small smartphone (I know this may be responsive heresy but Moodle has device detection and I use it!)

The dock is already optional - individual users don't have to use it even if the theme for their site allows it and I (again, entirely a personal opinion) find it to be perhaps the biggest weakness of the bootstrap themes that this is not possible at the moment. If an admin wants to block it (no pun intended) for their site/theme then there are settings available to do that already, but I don't believe features like this should just be dropped from core (or core themes) just because they are not appropriate in one scenario or are difficult to do in one context - Moodle is used in too many different ways and the option to use the dock should be there (with the features to disable it as it already has)

I do like the suggestion that it could be enabled/disabled for certain groups of users (by capabilities???), or individual blocks not being dockable, as I can see the point being made by others about course design and the importance of some blocks being visible at all times (Gavin wrote a blog post a while ago about something similar relating, I think, to side blocks always dropping below content in responsive themes) - not sure how that would work on a block by block basis, but the 'by capability' should be possible through a theme setting I would have thought - themes are plugins, plugins can have capabilities, can the dock be made aware of those capabilities??? or is this something needed to be done directly in the dock code itself rather than through a theme perhaps? hmmm

Richard

mark had some ideas on the amount of personalisation (or decisions to make) users have in moodle.

http://www.markdrechsler.com/?p=878

For me the fact a tutor can accidently disable the ability of a student to navigate/use moodle is pretty amazing.