One Section per page.

One Section per page.

by Andrew Spary -
Number of replies: 6

I have a course with 26 sections. Each section has passages of text, and iframed YouTube tutorial videos or uploaded graphics (pngs).

How can I get the student display to only show one section at a time? 

This is the course format, I have "Show one section per page" set but, it does not work:


Should I have created separate courses instead of topics? As it is, it takes too long for the students page to load. 

Any advice on resolving would be greatly appreciated; How to export the course to separate courses per page, A workaround, anything apart from telling me to start over! I have invested too much time in to this to fall at this final hurdle! 


As an administrator, if I select a section from the list, I see the navigation links:




If I select the Course Name, I get all 27 sections in a long list, which takes a while to load. This is the same as the way it is displayed to the students.



Logged in as a student, The course is displayed as is it when 'course name' is selected by the administrator:


Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Andrew Spary

Re: One Section per page.

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

The first time a student accesses the course they will see all the sections. Then once they have clicked to go to one section, it will then just display that one with arrows to the previous and next one. Did you try that?

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: One Section per page.

by Andrew Spary -

Thank you for your reply.

Yes, If I click one of the page titles, it does indeed switch to the correct view!

Now, how do I fix that? When the student starts the course, they should only see the first page.


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Andrew Spary

Re: One Section per page.

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

No - that is not how the Show only one section works I'm afraid. If you only wanted them to see the first section  only, you'd have to think of using Conditional activities or perhaps a different, contributed course format (that I don't know of).

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: One Section per page.

by Andrew Spary -

Mary,

Thank you again for replying.

I am having trouble getting me head around this... I am seeing a glaring bug that would be a showstopper for a real teacher.  I have to be missing something!

Have I created the course incorrectly? At only 26 pages, surely it cannot be the longest course ever created in Moodle. I have to be explaining my predicament incorrectly.

I have studied the many 'how to's' for Moodle and created a simple course, setting the topic count, then edited the page title and content.

It doesn't make sense that there is a setting "Show one section per page" which displays the entire course.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Andrew Spary

Re: One Section per page.

by Derek Chirnside -

Welcome to Moodle.org Andrew.

You have understood the situation correctly, and Mary is right.  Welcome to the Moodle "Scroll of death".  Something at the moment we just need to work around.  [search for "Moodle scroll of death"]

When you land at a course in 'single section view', you get the titles of all the sections in one page - click on the title THEN you get the one section view.  

This is better than in the old days where you ONLY saw every section AND contents.

Once you get a greater number of sections in Moodle, navigation is difficult, at least that is what I find and my students tell me.  You will find this question talked about here in the forums back to dot.  Some of the posts are from me.  Most Moodle Partners have a solution, and some of these are in the plugins database.  As well as some others.

Possible solutions: 

Course menu plugin: my current pick

At present I use the course menu plugin to help.  https://moodle.org/plugins/view/block_course_menu

See the illustration here: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=316278  This was my latest attempt to work on this what I see as a problem, but at present, no traction.

Even with 26 sections, the navigation is not too bad.  Especially with subsections in the menu.  Still a hefty scroll if you read it all, but you can get a nice compact menu to start from, and often one or two clicks and no scroll to get their.

If you like voting on issues, my tracker item from 2011 is here: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-27039

One topic plugin

If you have only a few sections, ONE TOPIC does what you want.  Opens at section 1 automatically.
https://moodle.org/plugins/view/format_onetopic

Not so good for many sections.  But I have dot it going well using Topic 1-Topic 20 with a description for each one.  There are other tabbed options.

Coding

Spend hours coding a page to link to the sections.  eg https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=153776#p673006

I heard someone had 'solved the problem" and traveled to visit them.  This was their solution. Individual coding the links to each section.

Other solutions

Let me know if you want more ideas.


Good luck.

-Derek



Average of ratings: -
In reply to Andrew Spary

Re: One Section per page.

by Just H -

Just guessing but I'd say you added all the text and video to the topic summary - don't.

Add a label for the content of a topic and the first page when they login will just list the titles of the topics.

Average of ratings: -