Testing and QA

I can also agree with what Luigi said. I am an administrator of medium sized Moodle installation (10.000 users, 2000 courses, around 600 teachers) and most of my teachers don't want to use + and - icons in current version that we are using, especially when they have to add or remove larger number of sections. I was really puzzled when I was QA testing something for 3.3 release and found out that this feature was missing, and even more puzzled when I was told that it was deliberately.

Since this feature is on the "Course settings" sub-page, I do not see a problem with re-enabling (or re-introducing) it ASAP. It won't change look and feel of the new UI at all. Please return that feature or a lot of us will be stucked (willingly) on version 3.1 or 3.3 indefinitely. Removal of that setting is a deal-breaker for me.

I see no good reason to remove that feature/setting whatsoever, but I see a lot of troubleshooting and support tickets in my/our future if it stays that way.

Oh, pardon me, Martin.

I created the issue while you were writing your forum post, I suppose.

It is here, Jasmin: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-58837

I'll link the two issues.

+1 for keeping the setting in Edit Course page, with a warning next to it about how changing the number may impact on orphaned activities etc.

For the +/- buttons, is there not a trade-off here - have it as a system level 'extra feature' setting as to whether or not the +/- buttons are shown at the bottom?
That way you get your usability viewpoint for the clean install, and those of us with users who understand it (plenty of ours do, with no problem whatsoever) can keep it with another of those stock settings we would change anyway.

And if enabled, and someone clicks + or -, it pops up a reminder of what it does (e.g. 'by clicking this button you will remove the bottom topic - if there are resources or activities in this section, it will orphan them. if you wish to proceed, click OK' and offer OK/Cancel buttons; and similar for the + button).

So, currently we have 11 votes for MDL-58837. MDL-56590 was solved because of 9 votes at that moment (now it has 10). A solution that Dave Perry gave (or a proposal for a solution) in this discussion looks good. And in MDL-58837 discussion, David Morrow also had a good proposal. Can one of those be transformed into some kind of feature request for 3.4, please?

And in the meantime, could we get the removed course setting back in one of the minor updates for 3.3, please? I was planning migration to 3.3 this summer, but obviously without that setting, I will use 3.2 or 3.1 even.

I also vote for putting this feature back into Moodle.  I have used Moodle in the past, but stopped using it for several years (because I was working on other projects).  I went back to Moodle today to begin a new site install.  I installed Moodle 3.3, and added my courses.  But I only added the course names and the descriptions -- a course catalogue.  Each course defaulted to 5 topics.  I stumbled onto this topic, and now realize that  I am going to have to uninstall Moodle 3.3 and install Moodle 3.2, because I am never going to know at the course creation how many topics / weeks are going to be in a course, and these values can be anywhere from 12 topics to courses that can have 180 days or even more.  The old way of putting in a number in the course settings for the number of topics / sections / weeks was definitely better.

As for the argument about "hanging activities" that can get lost when the number of topics is reduced, there is a simple solution.  For every course, create topics+1.  The +1 topic is always the "teacher's notes" topics and is never visible to the students and can never be deleted.  If a teacher wants 5 topics, in the source code, 6 topics will actually be created -- the 5 topics for the course and the 1 topic that is the teacher's notes section.  Any time, the number of topics is reduced and there is an issue with not knowing where to put an activity, because it was in one of the topics that were deleted, those activities are placed into the "teacher's notes" section.  This is how WordPress handles side items when a person deletes a whole section from the sidebar and there are modules in that section with settings.  Those modules are not deleted.  They are just put into an administrator work area.

You can also add an option to "delete empty topics" or "delete topics that are checked".   Not all teacher's create topics in order.  It is very realistic to enter in the mid-term and final project, and then fill in the other topics.

Also, I think restricting the number of topics / sections is a bad idea, because you don't how exactly a teacher is going to set up a course.  But do allow the feature to indicate how many topics to display on a page.  This would be similar to a store restricting how many products are displayed on a page.  Right now it is only all topics or 1 topic. 

Here is scenario that is not a standard course scenario that I am currently working with.  I am creating an intensive language course.  The course is going to be 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 10 months.  That is a total of 1000 hours of coursework during a physical school year.  Later on I am going to have to break up this course into versions that are two hours each day; and 1 hour each day.  Right now, I am not sure if I want to set up the course with each topic being a day (4 physical hours of class time) or each topic being a physical hour of class time.  I am going to have to play around with the system to see how things can work out visually and practically.

Bottom line is that the number of topics should be unlimited, but the number to display on a given page should be restricted.  If a student knows that each topic is a physical hour of class time and the course is 1000 hours long, they are not going to be "shocked", because they know that is what they are signing up for before they sign up for the course.  Or in the case of a elementary school teacher, that is just a standard school year.

My issue is not the fact that it is different.  The site now hangs whenever you turn editing on.  We just upgraded from 3.1 to 3.5 and the delay is extremely noticeable.  If it is this noticeable with no users other than myself testing, it is going to be very painful with 1200 of them.  Mine shows 1002 topics every time I edit a page.  Maybe there is something that didn't upgrade correctly from 3.1???

Brian

Martin,

Is there a move to change this all back to the previous method that worked for years?  I have been with Moodle as an administrator since 1.5 and this is a change that is causing major issues to my upgrade from 3.1 to 3.5.  I only use the LTS now and only upgrade over the summer.  All my upgraded classes have 1000 sections after the migration and the site is terribly slow with that many sections rendering in every page as they load.

I upgraded from 3.1 to 3.5 directly with no issues.  Would this not have been an issue if I had incrementally upgraded through 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and then 3.5?

I need to find some way to fix this before staff starts working on their Moodle pages for the fall as Moodle just went from great to a dud with the upgrade for us.

Brian

Hi,

as I have just pointed out in MDL-58837:

The field IS present when you are creating the course, so there is the root of the problem - not technical, but organizational / human / everday one. Creation of courses is done by administrators, not teachers (the setting of default system values is also set by admins). Teachers want to set their own number of sections, especially in HEI environment (like mine), so sometimes it is 10 topics (default value that I have set on my system), sometimes 15 (number of weeks per semester), sometimes it is 23 (I could ask the specific teacher why she wants her course divided into so many sections, but obviously there is a need).

Teachers, not admins, are most affected with the removal of this setting. And teachers must be able to do that easily. Or am I missing something here? + and - commands on the front page of the course is NOT a good solution.

Removal of a feature and then asking end-users: "So, why do you need it back?" is not so good for the production sites that we are running. I will definitely update all my production sites to max 3.2 and stay on it as long as possible because of this "feature". I have dozen questions a week on how to set-up number of weeks/sections from my teachers, and this would definitely be a step in a wrong direction. Have you ever tried to tell a person over the phone:

"Yes, click once, now again. Ok, now once more. Ha-ha, funny, it _WAS_ easier before. Yes, please, another click. And another. Aaaand the last click on icon +. There you go!"

I definitely support re-introduction of this setting ASAP, and if it cannot be included in 3.3 release (obviously), then in 3.3.1 or 3.4. Thank you.

Hello,

1. 'Orphaning' and the associated logic and processes have been clearly explained and documented in many, many places for many, many years - as a minimum, since I started using Moodle 2.0 in 2010. 'Some people not knowing about it' isn't a valid reason for removing a feature when 'lots of people do know about it and use it extensively'! 

2. Anything that limits flexibility in quickly organising a course page is a backward step. Deliberately moving the power for ordinary users to quickly adjust the number of course sections for their own courses is something I find almost incomprehensible. And to suggest that 'stealthing' is a replacement for 'orphaning' is also quite baffling. Perhaps the developers have not actually compared user experience of the two modes? I have just spend half an hour double-clicking 40 activities into 'stealth' mode which I would once have been able to 'orphan' in less than 30 seconds.

3. I agree with the person who said, 'Removal of a feature and then asking end-users: "So, why do you need it back?" is not so good... for anyone.

Well, we should all vote on MDL-58837 and let developers know that this is an important issue, then! It takes few seconds, and it might save us a lot of time and usability afterwards

To sum it up: control to the teacher(s)!

Your English is just fine.

Yes. Nice when the system works

Has there been any progress on this issue?  I'm just noticing it today as I set up a new course in 3.3.  I don't see a quick way to add/delete more than one topic at a time. 

Thank you.  All our upgraded courses from 3.1 to 3.5 have 1000 sections!  Every page loads terribly when a teacher turns editing on.

This is a major issue!  The inability to simply go in and set the number of sections for the teachers is making it 1000 administrator responsibility.

Brian

Ditto!

Is there a Tracker for removing sections?