General help

Hi,

I've been asked to set up a web-site for a course provider in health care, and I'm investigating using Moodle 1.5 for this. Right now, they have a web-site with a structure like this:

  X
  - Welcome
  - Activities at X
  - Contact info
  - How to get to X
  - Staff

  Presentation of X
  - Competencies
  - Projects

  Course activities
  - Courses at X

  Publications

  Partners

  Links

All of these pages are normal web-pages with some text and images, except the course activites, which we'll get to in a minute. When you look at these web-pages, you can see the structure in a hierarchical menu at the right hand side of the screen.

So my challenage is to get moodle to present such a content hierarchy, and keep the menu displayed when visiting the individual pages. I can add all the web-pages as resources to the main menu, but I'm unable to organise them in a hierarchy.

First question: How can I organise resources in a hierarchy and make things like the bread-crumb reflect this hierarchy?

Second question: How can I make sure that the main menu is visible on all pages, including resource pages?

All of these web-pages appear in two languages - either English and Danish. Next question: How can I explain to Moodle that each page exists in both a Danish and an English version?

The relevant organisation offers a bunch of courses, organised in a hierachy like this:

  Specialist courses
  - Intensive care therapy
  - Airway management
  - Paediatric anaethesia

  Interdisciplinary courses
  - Team-training resuscitation
  - Neonatal resuscitation

  Courses for educators & facilitators
  - Level 1
  - Level 2

These courses are held from time to time. They might hold the intensive care therapy course every two months, while the airway management course is held every 3 months. The course is the same when held the next time, in the sense that all the associated resources, quiz'es and surveys are the same, except for smaller updates. Of course, the participant list is different, so the question is how to organise this with moodle.

I can make course categories for "Specialist courses", "Interdisciplinary courses", and "Courses for educators & facilitators", and then add all the courses below. That takes care of the structure.

Also, I can make events and thus make the courses appear on the calendar when they are held, although the course is the event, so this seems a bit redundant.

But the real problem is that everytime they rerun a course, it seems that they have to create a new course, and add all the resources and activities again based on the previous course that was held.

So the next question is: Is there a beter way to handle a recurring course, other than re-added it again and again?

We are ready to do development to implement this, and I've done a fair bit of research to see if any contributed modules or blocks would be useful. I've found a few pieces here and there, but they all suffer from lack of maintenance and care, besides not being a 100% fit.

Also, it seems that these extensions would be best done directly in the core of moodle.

Therefore, my conclusion is that it would be better to develop this functionality in such a quality that the moodle maintainers would accept the features into the core distribution.

So, the next question: What is the best approach to make this happen? And where should we start?

Thanks in advance,
Asger Ottar Alstrup
Laerdal Sophus