Themes

If you can upgrade to Moodle 3.3, you should have a look at Fordson. 

https://moodle.org/plugins/theme_morecandy

The above link is one of my themes. It's called Morecandy, and based on the More theme, which is in Moodle. Morecandy is a simple theme but it is different.

The Dashboard page allows you to add blocks to the center section of that page so if done correctly the page can look like the images as defined in the Description of the theme in that link.

This a screenshot of the Dashboard page. Note that you have lots of options to add HTML blocks to the center of the page that cover the center width as in the Course Overview block or 2 smaller blocks in the lower half of the page as can be seen below.

Added to this if you read the Look & Learn section at the pinned discussions in the top of this Forum you will find links to tutorials showing you how to use Bootstrap code to add various extras to brighten up you Moodle pages.

LOOK & LEARN URL -> https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=359735

Cheers

Mary

Thanks for the links these both look really good, I will give them a shot!

Sometimes defining what you want the student to see and be able to do is best.  Define the flow of the site so that going from login to learning is fast and easy.  This is a concern of ours and we wanted to streamline this for our K-12 district.

Defining what a user does after login is what we did when designing Fordson.  We wanted the user to have a simple homepage that accomplished the following:

1. Enroll in courses with a simple code like Google Classroom (We built the Easy Enrollment plugin and fully integrated it into the homepage and course pages of the Fordson theme).  
   This is by far the easiest way to enroll students into courses unless you automate class enrollments.
2. Provide very visual navigation links to main areas of the site: Dashboard, Calendar, Badges, Mahara Portfolios, etc).  This is the icon navigation enhancement for the homepage.
3. Provide for site notices, introductions, and instructions on what to do next in the site. This would be custom textboxes, a bootstrap carousel, and up to 6 marketing tiles.  

On course pages we wanted all the links teacher use to manage their courses and users visible and organized.  We built a "Course Management" dashboard for teachers on course pages which provides all the links normally seen in Course Administration.  Links are organized and grouped. 

For students when they are on course pages they see a "This Course" dashboard which shows course completion, grades, teacher contacts, and course description.  

Hi Nathan,

Thank you for raising this query related to student dashboard, in spite of this being a very important element in student's learning it still is the most neglected one since LMS focus on aspects important for Trainers, Managers & Admin's.

Okay coming back to your query, in our research (before developing a Student Dashboard in Edwiser RemUI) we found that students usually want following elements in their dashboard,

• An element that shows them a schedule of events & activities that needs to be done the period being a week.
  
• They also need widgets which showcases their grades and highlights activities which they have ignored or missed out during the learning process. So that they don't miss out on important submissions etc.
• An easier way to in interact with peers and course teachers etc. 

We wrote an article explaining the mistakes that administrators make when it comes to developing a student-centric dashboard.

This should be useful for your analysis and subsequent implementation.  

Now, when it comes to Moodle indeed version 3.3 is much improved one and has a dedicated block for students so certainly I would suggest you upgrade your Moodle site to the latest version it would work wonders for you.

Thank you for all the links and helps these have been greatly informative and we are definitely looking towards upgrading to 3.3 and visiting some of the themes posted here, cheers!