Navigation
I recently tried making some user guides for students to show them how to get around (poor navigation being a long standing complaint).
Whilst doing this at site level was easy enough it unraveled once I got down into a course because at course level its pretty well "any old made up" depending on the presence and position of blocks.
We have been trying to address this in our theme (which you can now see in the Moodle.Org plugins database).
- As 2.8 now does users profile links are under their username
- Like other contributed themes we have a "my courses" drop down list
- We added a "This Course" drop down in the navigation which only appears in a course and shows links for the course you are in. This replicates the "activities" block on Moodle and adds a couple of other links
We plan to move more items into these three areas such as "blogs" "posts" under the users dropdown list, and other elements within the current course.
We have also disabled some blocks:
- Calendar (we have navigation links into this)
- Recent Updates (replaced that with CUL Activity Stream which scrolls within the block instead of spewing down the page)
- Upcoming Events (replaced that with CUL Upcoming Events which looks nicer and scrolls within the block instead of spewing down the page)
We also want to disable both the "navigation" and "administration" blocks for students, once we have moved remaining useful items into the theme navigation: The "navigation" block is terrible, having everything essentially means you have nothing, no one wants to use it. We notice a lot of students just dock it to get the clutter out of the way. Why would someone in "Course A" want an ever expanding sprawl down the page that allows them to dig into "course B" down to the level of a single PDF and open that PDF from another course when it is quicker, easier and frankly saner to go into that other course and find it?
Rival Processes for File Upload
The file picker is an ongoing problem for us as we use repositories, but many staff use the "rival" process of drag and drop into the course page, a particular problem with video as drag n drop adds the video file into the course whereas using one of our repositories sends it via Kaltura which transcodes it allowing video to play on any device.
One option would be to drag files into a block (allowing use of repositories) and drag files back from there. Another would be upon dragging into a course to ask which repository it should go into.
Inconsistent Assignment Settings
We value the flexibility offered by mod/assign and almost every feature is used by someone soemewhere, the downside is again we have "any old made up" in many courses. A simple example is some staff set "require submit button" and some don't which confuses students.
I know another University ripped out lots of features from assignment settings to get consistency but as I said, we don't want to limit what staff can do. I do not subscribe to the idea you should reduce Moodle functionality to the lowest common denominator.
That said some kid of wizard / workflow would go a long way so that instead of throwing staff straight into the morass of assignment settings there could be a two step process allowing the selection of "templates" which pre-populated certain presets and allowed staff to enter only minimal information. One of the options there could be "no template, I want to start from scratch".
Activity Chooser
The distinction between "activity" and "resource" no longer cuts it for us as we have a growing list of items in the list, often closely related but ad different ends of the list. Big Blue Button being a good illustration. The BBB session (online lecture) is an activity which appears near the top. The "recordings" are a resource type which also needs to be embedded if you want to give students access to recorded sessions. They are pretty well at opposite ends of the activity chooser at the moment.
The other issue with the activity chooser as it stands is that staff only tend to use what they know and ignore what they dont, in part because it is disorganised.
A better approach (IMO) would be to organise by type / function rather than the rather abstract notion of activity or resource. For example add headings for "Video" which could include things like BBB, Lecture Capture, Kaltura (or similar)
Another heading for "Content" which could include pages, labels etc (we are working on another plugin to render labels using Bootstrap elements like Modal, Toggle and would like to expand that to add accordian, tabs etc)
I guess with everyone having different setups it would be an idea to make this configurable to a point so admins could move things around different headings if they needed to.
I know that could be a lot of work but one of the benefits would be that when staff go to add "video" or "content" they see relevant options available to them at the time they are editing their course, they know by the heading that it relates to what they are trying to do at the time and thus maybe more inclined to look at things they have not used previously.
Hope that is of some use and doesn't upset anybody
