Adding Activities into Resources

Adding Activities into Resources

by Ken Farrimond -
Number of replies: 3
Picture of Plugin developers

I proposed this new feature at the Glasgow Moot and it was voted third by participants. The addition of stealth mode for activities and resources recognises how often teachers want students to access an activity from within a book, or a page or in a label with say Tabs added to it. However this is not simple for teachers are not very familiar with Moodle. What is being requested is a simple way to do this, so that in a book, for example, the add activity is available.

 

Practically this would be easiest to implement if it is seen as a way of automatically creating a stealth activity in the containing section for that book resources and placing a link to the activity into the book, along with the edit/delete functions.


Does anyone have a suggestion of how this might be implemented? I would be keen to help take this forward if possible. I have created this as a new feature request in the tracker

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-61783


Ken


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Ken Farrimond

Re: Adding Activities into Resources

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

You did. I was there. 

It struck me at the time that what you might want is an 'Add an activity' button in the Atto editor. You can then embed an activity (really just a link to an activity) inside any bit of text. A bit of Javascript could be organised to make it editable to teachers. 

I think the talk of 'stealth activities' rather confused matters as that's really an implementation decision. 

I can see all sorts of problems. It's changing the way that Moodle organises itself completely. You would also need a feature to make it easier to find activities (especially for the poor support staff) as they could be anywhere?

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Adding Activities into Resources

by C Behan -

I think restricting it to activities in the course is necessary for usability and for issues around enrollments and roles etc.

Embedding other activities (rather than just linking to them) would be helpful too.



Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to C Behan

Re: Adding Activities into Resources

by Ken Farrimond -
Picture of Plugin developers

Thanks for your responses. Certainly I agree with C Behan that it should be restricted to activities in the current course, or rather that any activity would be created within the current course and probably within the section that the resource was sitting in. That is what I meant by bringing in the issue of stealth mode - I was trying to work out how this could be implemented without a major change to the system of where activities sit within Moodle.

Howard's suggestion makes a lot of sense. In this context a straightforward way of implementing this would be to add a button in the atto editor that would

  1. Bring up a list of activity types and allow one to be selected (in the same way as this happens in a course section)
  2. When the an activity is selected and the various fields are populated, the new activity is saved in the section that the resouces is in, but set to  "make available but not shown on course page"
  3. A link to that activity is created along with the standard edit buttons to allow that activity to be editted from within the resoucese.

I suspect that it is the final part of 3 which would be most problematic and if neccessary it could be left that you go into the activity in order to edit it, but it would be best for less experienced users if it just looked the same.

Problems with this would be moving, backing up resources that "contain" activities, but in a sense this is the same situtation that happens with activity autolinking - if you do not copy both the resource and the original activity it will not work, but it will be obvious why.

Ken


Average of ratings: -