Yes, I really mean that. I posted details here: http://docs.moodle.org/dev/unify_all_activities_and_resources
Currently there are many different kinds of activities and resources, with varying features, some of which would be desirable in other activities. For example, ratings could be used by students to give feedback on faculty-posted resources. Rubrics could be used in grading Forum discussions. The Allocation features of Workshop could be helpful in the Assignment activity.
Some of these activities, like the Quiz activity, implement plugins for question types and behaviors, but these can't be used in other, similar activities.
Yet, all of the activities and resources are just different variations on databases. It is easier for most instructors to use pre-constructed activities like the current Quizzes or Assignments, but these could be implemented as templated presets of a new, super-database activity. This is what is proposed in the linked page.
Here is an example of what I would use it for:
At the beginning of a course, we want to ask students what their objectives are for taking a course, and when they hope to achieve that objective. For example, someone might be taking a course to be able to get a better job, or to go to graduate school, or to solve a particular problem they have at work or in a hobby.
With this super-activity, we would create a question: "What goal do you hope to reach by taking this course?" We would also ask "when do you hope to reach that goal?"
The student could enter one or more goals and dates. When the date is reached, the student would receive a notification from Moodle: "On date xxxx, you said that you hoped you would reach goal xxxxx by this date. Have you reached this goal?" The student would then be able to click a link, return to the course in Moodle, and indicate whether they had reached the goal, or wanted to set a new date.
We would use the resulting data to determine what goals our students have and whether or not they are reaching them. We would be able to work with our students identify additional steps they might take to reach their goals. We would be able to evaluate our course designs to see if they are applicable to help our students reach their goals.
Here's another example. We include an Announcements forum in the "zero" topic of each course. We would like to be able to display the most recent post(s) within the course page, just below the Announcements forum link itself.
Here's a third example. We ask students to post resources within courses to share with other students. We would like to enable ratings for these resources and automatically show the highest rated links within the course, as well as allowing students or the instructor to see the most recent unrated links.
Here is a fourth example. An instructor asks each student to post a project using a spreadsheet. The instructor asks each student to self-evaluate the project using a rubric before submitting it. The "submission" criteria are set so that the attached file cannot be considered "submitted" until this self-evaluation rubric is completed.
A fifth example: the college decides to standardize links out to video streaming sites as a new "type" of resource. An activity template is created that includes a custom video icon and accepts a URL to a video. The video will be displayed on a page within the course, with a forum below it that appears after the video has been watched. The activity is defined to be "completed" when the student clicks the link to view the video AND submits a comment in the embedded forum.
The idea is to create a flexible Activity that would allow an instructor or course developer to adjust the parameters and create new kinds of activities without needing to code in PHP. Groups of related interactions could be easily combined into a single activity for convenience of student viewing and instructor grading. It would also allow plugins like the Advanced Grading plugins to be developed once and used with multiple Activities, since they would all really be the same activity with different settings.
Ideally, a migration tool would allow existing Activities and Resources to be converted to this format.
Is there any interest in having such a structure? We would be interested in helping to fund it if we can get enough interest from other institutions and from Moodle HQ to get the feature into Core.